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CIVILIZATION IN THE 
UNITED STATES 

AN INQUIRY BY THIRTY AMERICANS 



EDITED BY HAROLD E. STEARNS 




NEW YORK 

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 

1922 






3 



COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 



PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY 

THE QUINN a DODEN COMPANY 

RAHWAY. N. J. 



FEB -3 1922' XT 



g)Ci.A654475 



PREFACE 

This book has been an adventure in intellectual co-operation. 
If it were a mere collection of haphazard essays, gathered 
together to make the conventional symposium, it would have 
only slight significance. But it has been the deliberate and 

anized outgrowth of the common efforts of like-minded men 
and women to see the problem of modern American civiliza- 
tion as a whole, and to illuminate by careful criticism the 
special aspect of that civilization with which the individual 
is most familiar. Personal contact has served to correct over- 
emphasis, and slow and careful selection of the members of a 
group which has now grown to some thirty-odd has given to 
this work a unity of approach and attack which it otherwise 
could not possibly have had. 

The nucleus of this group was brought together by com- 
mon work, common interests, and more or less common assump- 
tions. As long ago as the autumn of last year Mr, Van Wyck 
Brooks and I discussed the possibility of several of us, 
who were engaged in much the same kind of critical examina- 
tion of our civilization, coming together to exchange ideas, to 
clarify our individual fields, and to discover wherein they coin- 
cided, overlapped, or diverged. The original desire was the 
modest one of making it possible for us to avoid working at 
cross-purposes. I suggested that we meet at my home, which 
a few of us did, and since that time until the delivery of this 
volume to the publishers we have met every fortnight. Even 
at our first meeting we discovered our points of view to have 
so much in common that our desire for informal and pleasant 
discussions became the more serious wish to contribute a defi- 
nite and tangible piece of work towards the advance of intel- 
lectual life in America. We wished to speak the truth about 
American civilization as we saw it, in order to do our share 
in making a real civilization possible — for I think with all of 
us there was a common assumption that a field cannot be 



IV 



PREFACE 



ploughed until it has first been cleared of rocks, and that con- 
structive criticism can hardly exist until there is something 
on which to construct. 

Naturally the first problem to arise was the one of ways and 
means. If the spirit and temper of the French encyclopaedists 
of the 1 8th century appealed strongly to us, certainly their 
method for the advancement of knowledge was inapplicable in 
our own century. The cultural phenomena we proposed to 
survey were too complicated and extensive; besides, we wished 
to make a definite contribution of some kind or another while, 
so to speak, there was yet time. For the cohesiveness of the 
group, the good-humoured tolerance and cheerful sacrifice of 
time, were to some extent the consequence of the intellectual 
collapse that came with the hysterical post-armistice days, 
when it was easier than in normal times to get together intel- 
ligent and civilized men and women in common defence against 
the common enemy of reaction. We wished to take advan- 
tage of this strategic situation for the furtherance of our co- 
operative enterprise, and decided, finally, that the simplest plan 
would be the best. Each of us was to write a single short 
essay on the special topic we knew most thoroughly; we were 
to continue our meetings in order to keep informed of the 
progress of our work and to see that there was no duplication; 
we were to extend the list of subjects to whatever legitimately 
bore upon our cultural life and to select the authors by com- 
mon agreement; we were to keep in touch with each other 
so that the volume might have that inner consistency which 
could come only from direct acquaintance with what each of 
us was planning. 

There were a few other simple rules which we laid down 
in the beginning. Desirous of avoiding merely irrelevant criti- 
cism and of keeping attention upon our actual treatment of 
our subjects rather than upon our personalities, we provided 
that all contributors to the volume must be American citizens. 
For the same reason, we likewise provided that in the list there 
should be no professional propagandists — except as one is a 
propagandist for one's own ideas — no martyrs, and no one who 
was merely disgruntled. Since our object was to give an un- 
compromising, and consequently at some points necessarily 



PREFACE V 

harsh, analysis, we desired the tone to be good-natured and 
the temper urbane. At first, these larger points of policy were 
decided by common agreement or, on occasion, by majority 
vote, and to the end I settled no important question without 
consultation with as many members of the group as I could 
approach within the limited time we had agreed to have this 
volume in the hands of the publisher. But with the extension 
of the scope of the book, the negotiations with the publisher, 
and the mass of complexities and details that are inevitable in 
so difficult an enterprise, the authority to decide specific ques- 
tions and the usual editorial powers were delegated as a matter 
of convenience to me, aided by a committee of three. Hence 
I was in a position constantly to see the book as a whole, 
and to make suggestions for differentiation, where repetition 
appeared to impend, or for unity, where the divergence 
was sharp enough to be construed by some as contradictory. 
In view both of the fact that every contributor has full liberty 
of opinion and that the personalities and points of view finding 
expression in the essays are all highly individualistic, the un- 
derlying unity which binds the volume together is really 
surprising. 

It may seem strange that a volume on civilization in the 
United States does not include a specific article on religion, 
and the omission is worth a paragraph of explanation. Out- 
side the bigger cities, certainly no one can understand the social 
structure of contemporary American life without careful study 
of the organization and power of the church. Speaking gen- 
erally, we are a church-going people, and at least on the sur- 
face the multiplicity of sects and creeds, the sheer immensity 
of the physical apparatus by which the religious impulse is 
articulated, would seem to prove that our interest in and 
emotional craving for religious experience are enormous. But 
the omission has not been due to any superciliousness on our 
part towards the subject itself; on the contrary, I suppose I 
have put more thought and energy into this essay, which has 
not been written, than into any other problem connected with 
the book. The bald truth is, it has been next to impossible 
to get any one to write on the subject; most of the people I 
approached shied off — it was really difficult to get them to talk 



vi PREFACE 

about it at all. Almost unanimously, when I did manage to 
procure an opinion from them, they said that real religious 
feeling in America had disappeared, that the church had be- 
come a purely social and political institution, that the country 
is in the grip of what Anatole France has aptly called Prot- 
estant clericalism, and that, finally, they weren't interested in 
the topic. The accuracy of these observations (except the 
last) I cannot, of course, vouch for, but it is rather striking 
that they were identical. In any event, the topic as a topic 
has had to be omitted; but it is not neglected, for in several 
essays directly — in particular, 'Thilosophy" and "Nerves" — 
and in many by implication the subject is discussed. At one 
time Mr. James Harvey Robinson consented to write the article 
— and it would have been an illuminating piece of work — but 
unfortunately ill health and the pressure of official duties made 
the task impossible for him within the most generous time 
limit that might be arranged. 

I have spoken already of the unity which underlies the vol- 
ume. When I remember all these essays, and try to summon 
together the chief themes that run through them, either by 
explicit statement or as a kind of underlying rhythm to all, 
in order to justify the strong impression of unity, I find three 
major contentions that may be said to be basic — contentions 
all the more significant inasmuch as they were unpremeditated 
and were arrived at, as it were, by accident rather than design. 
They are: 

First, That in almost every branch of American life there 
is a sharp dichotomy between preaching and practice; we let 
not our right hand know what our left hand doeth. Curiously 
enough, no one regards this, and in fact no one consciously 
feels this as hypocrisy — there are certain abstractions and 
dogmas which are sacred to us, and if we fall short of these 
external standards in our private life, that is no reason for 
submitting them to a fresh examination; rather are we to 
worship them the more vociferously to show our sense of sin. 
Regardless, then, of the theoretical excellence or stupidity of 
these standards, in actual practice the moral code resolves itself 
into the one cardinal heresy of being found out, with the chief 
sanction enforcing it, the fear of what people will say. 



PREFACE vii 

Second, That whatever else American civilization is, it is not 
Anglo-Saxon, and that we shall never achieve any genuine 
nationalistic self-consciousness as long as we allow certain 
financial and social minorities to persuade us that we are still 
an English Colony. Until we begin seriously to appraise and 
warmly to cherish the heterogeneous elements which make up 
our life, and to see the common element running through all 
of them, we shall make not even a step towards true unity; 
we shall remain, in Roosevelt's class-conscious and bitter but 
illuminating phrase, a polyglot boarding-house. It is curious 
how a book on American civilization actually leads one back 
to the conviction that we are, after all, Americans. 

Third, That the most moving and pathetic fact in the social 
life of America to-day is emotional and aesthetic starvation, 
of which the mania for petty regulation, the driving, regimen- 
tating, and drilling, the secret society and its grotesque regalia, 
the firm grasp on the unessentials of material organization of 
our pleasures and gaieties are all eloquent stigmata. We have 
no heritages or traditions to which to cling except those that 
have already withered in our hands and turned to dust. One 
can feel the whole industrial and economic situation as so 
maladjusted to the primary and simple needs of men and 
women that the futility of a rationalistic attack on these in- 
fantilisms of compensation becomes obvious. There must be 
an entirely new deal of the cards in one sense; we must change 
our hearts. For only so, unless through the humbling of 
calamity or scourge, can true art and true religion and true 
personality, with their native warmth and caprice and gaiety, 
grow up in America to exorcise these painted devils we have 
created to frighten us away from the acknowledgment of our 
spiritual poverty. 

If these main contentions seem severe or pessimistic, the 
answer must be: we do not write to please; we strive only 
to understand and to state as clearly as we can. For Ameri- 
can civilization is still in the embryonic stage, with rich and 
with disastrous possibilities of growth. But the first step in 
growing up is self-conscious and deliberately critical examina- 
tion of ourselves, without sentimentality and without fear. We 
cannot even devise, much less control, the principles which are 



viii PREFACE 

to guide our future development until that preliminary under- 
standing has come home with telling force to the consciousness 
of the ordinary man. To this self-understanding, this book is, 
in our belief, a genuine and valuable contribution. We may 
not always have been wise; we have tried always to be honest. 
And if our attempt will help to embolden others to an equally 
frank expression of their beliefs, perhaps in time wisdom will 
come. 

I am glad that, however serious, we are never solemn in these 
essays. Often, in fact, we are quite gay, and it would be a 
humourless person indeed who could not read many of them, 
even when the thrusts are at himself, with that laughter which 
Rabelais tells us is proper to the man. For whatever our de- 
fects, we Americans, we have one virtue and perhaps a saving 
virtue — we still know how to laugh at ourselves. 

H. E. S. 

New York City, July Fourth, 192 1. 



CONTENTS 



Preface 

The City 

Politics 

Journalism 

The Law 

Education 

Scholarship and Criticism 
School and College Life . 
The Intellectual Life . 

Science 

Philosophy 

The Literary Life * . 

Music 

Poetry 

Art 

The Theatre .... 
Economic Opinion . 

Radicalism 

The Small Town . 

History 

Sex 

The Family 

The Alien 

Racial Minorities . 

Advertising 

Business 

Engineering .... 



The Editor . 
Lewis Mumjord 
H. L. Mencken . 
John Macy . 
Zechariah Chajee, Jr. 
Robert Morss Lovett 
J. E. Spingarn . 
Clarence Britten 
Harold E. Stearns , 
Robert H. Lowie . 
Harold Chapman Brown 
Van Wyck Brooks . 
Deems Taylor . 
Conrad Aiken . 
Walter Pach 
George Jean Nathan 
- W -o lto t ' H. Hamilton 
George Soule 
Louis Raymond Raid 
H. W. Van Loon 
Elsie Clews Parsons 
Katharine Anthony 
Frederic C. Howe . 
Geroid Tanquary Robinson 
J. Thome Smith 
Garet Garrett . 
0. S. Beyer, Jr. . 



PAGE 

iii 
3 

21 

35 
53 
77 
93 
109 

135 
151 
163 
179 
199 

215 

227 
243 

255 
271^ 

28s 
297 
309 
319 
337 
351 
381 
397 
417 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Nerves Alfred B. Kuttner . . . .427 

Medicine Anonymous 443 

Sport and Play .... Ring W. Lardner . . . .457 

Humour Frank M. Colby .... 463 

American Civilization from the Foreign Point of View 

I As an Englishman Sees It Henry L. Stuart . . . 469 

II '' " Irishman " " Ernest Boyd .... 489 

III " " Italian " " Raffaello Piccoli ... 508 

Bibliographical Notes 527 

Who's Who of the Contributors 557 

Index 565 



CIVILIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES 



THE CITY 

AROUND us, in the city, each epoch in America has been 
concentrated and crystallized. In building our cities we 
deflowered a wilderness. To-day more than one-half the popu- 
lation of the United States lives in an environment which 
the jerry-builder, the real estate speculator, the paving con- 
tractor, and the industrialist have largely created. Have we 
begotten a civilization? That is a question which a survey of 
the American city will help us to answer. 

If American history is viewed from the standpoint of the 
student of cities, it divides itself roughly into three parts. The 
first was a provincial period, which lasted from the foundation 
of Manhattan down to the opening up of ocean commerce after 
the War of 1812. This was followed by a commercial period, 
which began with the cutting of canals and ended with the 
extension of the railroad system across the continent, and an 
industrial period, that gathered force on the Atlantic seaboard 
in the 'thirties and is still the dominant economic phase of 
our civilization. These periods must not be looked upon as 
strictly successive or exclusive: the names merely express in a 
crude way the main aspect of each era. It is possible to 
telescope the story of America's colonial expansion and indus- 
trial exploitation by following the material growth and the 
cultural impoverishment of the American city during its trans- 
formations. 

The momentum of the provincial city lasted well on to the 
Civil War. The economic basis of this period was agriculture 
and petty trade: its civic expression was, typically, the small 
New England town, with a central common around which were 
grouped a church — appropriately called a meeting-house — a 
school, and perhaps a town hall. Its main street would be 
lined with tall suave elms and bordered by reticent white 
houses of much the same design as those that dotted the coun- 
tryside. In the growing towns of the seaboard this culture was 

3 



4 CIVILIZATION 

overthrown, before it had a chance to express itself adequately 
in either institutions or men, and it bloomed rather tardily, 
therefore, in the little towns of Concord and Cambridge, be- 
tween 1820 and the Civil War. We know it to-day through 
a largely anonymous architecture, and through a literature cre- 
ated by the school of writers that bears the name of the chief 
city. Unfortunately for the further development of what we 
might call the Concord culture, the agricultural basis of this 
civilization shifted to the wheat-growing West; and therewith 
channels of trade were diverted from Boston to ports that 
tapped a richer, more imperial hinterland. What remained 
of the provincial town in New England was a mummy-case. 

The civilization of the New England town spent itself in 
the settlement of the Ohio Valley and the great tracts beyond. 
None of the new centres had, qua provincial towns, any fresh 
contribution to make. It had taken the culture of New Eng- 
land more than three centuries before it had borne its Con- 
cord fruit, and the story of the Western movement is some- 
how summed up in the legend of Johnny Appleseed, who 
planted dry apple seeds, instead of slips from the living tree, 
and hedged the roads he travelled with wild apples, harsh and 
puny and inedible. Cincinnati and Pittsburgh jumped from 
a frustrate provincialism into the midst of the machine era; 
and so for a long time they remained destitute of the insti- 
tutions that are necessary to carry on the processes of civili- 
zation. 

West of the Alleghanies, the common, with its church and 
school, was not destined to dominate the urban landscape: the 
railroad station and the commercial hotel had come to take 
their place. This was indeed the universal mark of the new 
industrialism, as obvious in 19th-century Oxford as in Ho- 
boken. The pioneer American city, however, had none of the 
cultural institutions that had been accumulated in Europe dur- 
ing the great outbursts of the Middle Age and the Renaissance, 
and as a result its destitution was naked and apparent. It is 
true that every town which was developed mainly during the 
19th century — Manchester as well as Milwaukee — suffered 
from the absence of civic institutes. The peculiarity of the 



THE CITY 5 

New World was that the facilities for borrowing from the 
older centres were considerably more limited. London could 
export Madox Brown to Manchester to do the murals in the 
Town Hall: New York had still to create its schools of art 
before it had any Madox Browns that could be exported. 

With the beginning of the 19th century, market centres which 
had at first tapped only their immediate region began to reach 
further back into the hinterland, and to stretch outward, not 
merely for freight but for immigrants, across the ocean. The 
silly game of counting heads became the fashion, and in the 
literature of the 'thirties one discovers that every commercial 
city had its statistical lawyer who was bold enough to predict 
its leadership in " population and wealth " before the century 
was out. The chief boast of the American city was its pros- 
pective size. 

Now the New England town was a genuine community. In 
so far as the New England community had a common social 
and political and religious life, the town expressed it. The 
city which was representative of the second period, on the 
other hand, was in origin a trading fort, and the supreme 
occupation of its founders was with the goods life rather than 
the good life. New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis 
have this common basis. They were not composed of cor- 
porate organizations on the march, as it were, towards a New 
Jerusalem : they were simply a rabble of individuals " on the 
make." With such a tradition to give it momentum it is 
small wonder that the adventurousness of the commercial period 
was exhausted on the fortuities and temptations of trade. A 
state of intellectual anaesthesia prevailed. One has only to 
compare Cist's Cincinnati Miscellany with Emerson's Dial to 
see at what a low level the towns of the Middle West were 
carrying on. 

Since there was neither fellowship nor social stability nor 
security in the scramble of the inchoate commercial city, it 
remained for a particular institution to devote itself to the 
gospel of the " glad hand." Thus an historian of Pittsburgh 
records the foundation of a Masonic lodge as early as 1785, 
shortly after the building of the church, and in every Ameri- 



M 



6 CIVILIZATION 

can city, small or big, Odd Fellows, Mystic Shriners, Wood- 
men, Elks, Knights of Columbus, and other orders without 
number in the course of time found for themselves a promi- 
nent place. (Their feminine counterparts were the D.A.R. 
and the W.C.T.U., their juniors, the college Greek letter fra- 
ternities.) Whereas one will search American cities in vain 
for the labour temples one discovers to-day in Europe from 
Belgium to Italy, one finds that the fraternal lodge generally 
occupies a site of dignity and importance. There were doubt- 
less many excellent reasons for the strange proliferation of 
professional fraternity in the American city^ but perhaps the 
strongest reason was the absence of any other kind of fra- 
ternity. The social centre and the community centre, which 
in a singularly hard and consciously beatific way have sought 
to organize fellowship and mutual aid on different terms, are 
products of the last decade. 

Perhaps the only other civic institution of importance that 
the commercial towns fostered was the lyceum: forerunner 
of the elephantine Chautauqua. The lyceum lecture, however, 
was taken as a soporific rather than a stimulant, and if it 
aroused any appetite for art, philosophy, or science there was 
nothing in the environment of the commercial city that could 
satisfy it. Just as church-going became a substitute for reli- 
gion, so automatic lyceum attendance became a substitute for 
thought. These were the prayer wheels of a preoccupied 
commercialism. 

The contrast between the provincial and the commercial 
city in America was well summed up in their plans. Consider 
the differences between Cambridge and New York. Up to the 
beginning of the 19th century New York, at the tip of Man- 
hattan Island, had the same diffident, rambling town plan that 
characterizes Cambridge. In this old type of city layout the 
streets lead nowhere, except to the buildings that give onto 
them: outside the main roads the provisions for traffic are so 
inadequate as to seem almost a provision against traffic. Quiet 
streets, a pleasant aspect, ample domestic facilities were the 
desiderata of the provincial town; traffic, realty speculation, 
and expansion were those of the newer era. This became evi- 
dent as soon as the Empire City started to realize its " mani- 



THE CITY 7 

fest destiny" by laying down, in 1808, a plan for its future 
development. 

New York's city plan commissioners went about their work 
with a scarcely concealed purpose to increase traffic and raise 
realty values. The amenities of city life counted for little in 
their scheme of things: debating "whether they should con- 
fine themselves to rectilinear and rectangular streets, or 
whether they should adopt some of those supposed improve- 
ments, by circles, ovals, and stars," they decided, on grounds 
of economy, against any departure from the gridiron design. 
It was under the same stimulus that these admirable philistines 
had the complacency to plan the city's development up to 
155th Street. Here we are concerned, however, with the 
results of the rectangular plan rather than with the 
motives that lay behind its adoption throughout the coun- 
try. 

The principal effect of the gridiron plan is that every street 
becomes a thoroughfare, and that every thoroughfare is po- 
tentially a commercial street. The tendency towards move- 
ment in such a city vastly outweighs the tendency towards 
settlement. As a result of progressive shifts in population, 
due to the changes to which commercial competition subjects 
the use of land, the main institutions of the city, instead of 
cohering naturally — as the museums, galleries, theatres, clubs, 
and public offices group themselves in the heart of West- 
minster — are dispersed in every direction. Neither Columbia 
University, New York University, the Astor Library, nor the 
National Academy of Design — to seize but a few examples — 
is on its original site. Yet had Columbia remained at Fiftieth 
Street it might have had some effective working relation with 
the great storehouse of books that now occupies part of 
Bryant Park at Forty-second Street; or, alternatively, had the 
Astor Library remained on its old site it might have had some 
connection with New York University — had that institution not 
in turn moved! 

What was called the growth of the commercial city was 
really a manifestation of the absence of design in the gridiron 
plan. The rectangular parcelling of ground promoted specu- 
lation in land-units and the ready interchange of real prop- 



8 CIVILIZATION 

erty: it had no relation whatever to the essential purposes for 
which a city exists. It is not a little significant that Chicago, 
Cincinnati, and St. Louis, each of which had space set aside 
for public purposes in their original plans, had given up these 
civic holdings to the realty gambler before half of the 19th 
century was over. The common was not the centre of a 
well-rounded community life, as in New England, but the cen- 
tre of land-speculation — which was at once the business, the 
recreation, and the religion of the commercial city. Under 
the influence of New York the Scadders whom Martin Chuz- 
zlewit encountered were laying down their New Edens through- 
out the country. 

It was during the commercial period that the evolution of 
the Promenade, such as existed in New York at Battery 
Park, took place. The new promenade was no longer a park 
but a shop-lined thoroughfare, Broadway. Shopping became 
for the more domesticated half of the community an exciting, 
bewildering amusement; and out of a combination of Yankee 
" notions," Barnum-like advertisement, and magisterial or- 
ganization arose that omnium gatherum of commerce, the 
department store. It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the 
part that Broadway — I use the term generically — has played 
in the American town. It is not merely the Agora but the 
Acropolis. When the factory whistle closes the week, and 
the factory hands of Camden, or Pittsburgh, or Bridgeport pour 
out of the buildings and stockades in which they spend the 
more exhausting half of their lives, it is through Broadway 
that the greater part of their repressions seek an outlet. Both 
fhe name and the institution extend across the continent from 
New York to Los Angeles. Up and down these second-hand 
Broadways, from one in the afternoon until past ten at night, 
drifts a more or less aimless mass of human beings, bent upon 
extracting such joy as is possible from the sights in the win- 
dows, the contacts with other human beings, the occasional or 
systematic flirtations, and the risks and adventures of pur- 
chase. 

In the early development of Broadway the amusements were 
adventitious Even at present, in spite of the ubiquitous 



THE CITY . 9 

movie, the crowded street itself, at least in the smaller com- 
munities, is the main source of entertainment. Now, under 
normal conditions, for a great part of the population in a 
factory town one of the chief instincts to be repressed is that 
of acquisition (collection). It is not merely that the average 
factory worker cannot afford the luxuries of life: the worst 
is that he must think twice before purchasing the necessities. 
Out of this situation one of Broadway's happiest achievements 
has arisen: the five and ten cent store. In the five and ten 
cent store it is possible for the circumscribed factory operative 
to obtain the illusion of unmoderated expenditure — and even 
extravagance — without actually inflicting any irreparable rent 
in his purse. Broadway is thus, in more than one sense, the 
great compensatory device of the American city. The dazzle 
of white lights, the colour of electric signs, the alabaster archi- 
tecture of the moving-picture palaces, the aesthetic appeals of 
the shop windows — these stand for elements that are left out 
of the drab perspectives of the industrial city. People who 
do not know how to spend their time must take what satisfac- 
tion they can in spending their money. That is why, although 
the five and ten cent store itself is perhaps mainly an institu- 
tion for the proletariat, the habits and dispositions it encourages 
are universal. The chief amusement of Atlantic City, that 
opulent hostelry-annex of New York and Philadelphia, lies 
not in the beach and the ocean but in the shops which line the 
interminable Broadway known as the Boardwalk. 

Broadway, in sum, is the fagade of the American city: a 
false front. The highest achievements of our material civiliza- 
tion — and at their best our hotels, our department stores, and 
our Woolworth towers are achievements — count as so many 
symptoms of its spiritual failure. In order to cover up the 
vacancy of getting and spending in our cities, we have invented 
a thousand fresh devices for getting and spending. As a con- 
sequence our life is externalized. The principal institutions 
of the American city are merely distractions that take our eyes 
off the environment, instead of instruments which would help 
us to mould it creatively a little nearer to humane hopes and 
desires. 

The birth of industrialism in America is announced in the 



10 CIVILIZATION 

opening of the Crystal Palace in Bryant Park^ Manhattan, in 
1853. Between the Crystal Palace Exhibition and the Chi- 
cago World's Fair in 1893 li^s a period whose defects were 
partly accentuated by the exhaustion that followed the Civil 
War. The debasement of the American city during this period 
can be read in almost every building that was erected. The 
influence of colonial architecture had waned to extinction dur- 
ing the first half of the century. There followed a period of 
eclectic experiment, in which all sorts of Egyptian, Byzantine, 
Gothic, and Arabesque ineptitudes were committed — a period 
whose absurdities we have only in recent years begun to es- 
cape. The domestic style, as the century progressed, became 
more limited. Little touches about the doors, mouldings, fan- 
lights, and balustrades disappeared, and finally craftsmanship 
went out of style altogether and a pretentious architectural 
puffery took its place. The " era of good feeling " was an era 
of bad taste. 

Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Chicago give perhaps the most 
naked revelation of the industrial city's characteristics. 
There were two institutions that set their mark upon the early 
part of this period. One of them was the Mechanics' Hall. 
This was usually a building of red brick, structural iron, and 
glass, whose unique hideousness marks it as a typical product 
of the age of coal-industrialism, to be put alongside the 
" smoke-halls " of the railroad termini. The other institution 
was the German beer-garden — the one bright spot on the edge 
of an urban landscape that was steadily becoming more dingy, 
more dull, and more depressing. The cities that came to life 
in this period had scarcely any other civic apparatus to boast 
of. Conceive of Pittsburgh without Schenley Park, without 
the Carnegie Institute, without the Library or the Museum 
or the Concert Hall, and without the institutions that have 
grown up during the last generation around its sub-Acropolis 
— and one has a picture of Progress and Poverty that Henry 
George might have drawn on for illustration. The industrial 
city did not represent the creative values in civilization: it 
stood for a new form of human barbarism. In the coal towns 
of Pennsylvania, the steel towns of the Ohio and its tribu- 
taries, and the factory towns of Long Island Sound and Nar- 



THE CITY II 

ragansett Bay was an environment much more harsh, antago- 
nistic, and brutal than anything the pioneers had encountered. 
Even the fake exhilaration of the commercial city was lack- 
ing. 

The reaction against the industrial city was expressed in 
various ways. The defect of these reactions was that they 
were formulated in terms of an escape from the environment 
rather than in a reconstruction of it. Symptomatic of this 
escape, along one particular alley, was the architecture of 
Richardson, and of his apprentices, McKim and White. No 
one who has an eye for the fine incidence of beautiful archi- 
tecture can avoid a shock at discovering a monumental Ro- 
manesque building at the foot of Pittsburgh's dingy " Hump," 
or the hardly less monstrous beauty of Trinity Church, Bos- 
ton, as one approaches it from a waste of railroad yards that 
lie on one side of it. It was no accident, one is inclined to 
.believe, that Richardson should have returned to the Roman- 
esque only a little time before Henry Adams was exploring 
Mont St. Michel and Chartres. Both men were searching 
for a specific against the fever of industrialism, and archi- 
tects like Richardson were taking to archaic beauty as a man 
who was vaguely ill might have recourse to quinine, in the 
hope that his disease had sufficient similarity to malaria to be 
cured by it. 

The truth is that the doses of exotic architecture which 
Richardson and his school sought to inject into the American 
city were anodynes rather than specifics. The Latin Renais- 
sance models of McKim and White — the Boston Public Li- 
brary and Madison Square Garden, for example — were per- 
haps a little better suited to the concrete demands of the new 
age; but they were still a long way from that perfect con- 
gruence with contemporary habits and modes of thought which 
was recorded in buildings like Independence Hall. Almost 
down to the last decade the best buildings of the industrial 
period have been anonymous, and scarcely ever recognized for 
their beauty. A grain elevator here, a warehouse there, an 
office building, a garage — there has been the promise of a 
stripped, athletic, classical style of architecture in these build- 
ings which shall embody all that is good in the Machine Age: 



12 CIVILIZATION 

its precision, its cleanliness, its hard illuminations, its unflinch- 
ing logic. Dickens once poked fun at the architecture of 
Coketown because its infirmary looked like its jail and its jail 
like its town hall. But the joke had a sting to it only because 
these buildings were all plaintively destitute of aesthetic inspi- 
ration. In a place and an age that had achieved a well-rounded 
and balanced culture, we should expect to find the same spirit 
expressed in the simplest cottage and the grandest public 
building. So we find it, for instance, in the humble market 
towns of the Middle Age: there is not one type of architecture 
for 15th-century Shaftesbury and another for London; neither 
is there one style for public London and quite another for 
domestic London. Our architects in America have only just 
begun to cease regarding the Gothic style as especially fit for 
churches and schools, whilst they favour the Roman mode 
for courts, and the Byzantine, perhaps, for offices. Even the 
unique beauty of the Bush Terminal Tower is compromised by 
an antiquely " stylized " interior. 

With the beginning of the second decade of this century 
there is some evidence of an attempt to make a genuine cul- 
ture out of industrialism — instead of attempting to escape from 
industrialism into a culture which, though doubtless genuine 
enough, has the misfortune to be dead. The schoolhouses 
in Gary, Indiana, have some of the better qualities of a Gary 
steel plant. That symptom is all to the good. It points per- 
haps to a time when the Gary steel plant may have some of 
the educational virtues of a Gary school. One of the things 
that has made the industrial age a horror in America is the 
notion that there is something shameful in its manifestations. 
The idea that nobody would ever go near an industrial plant 
except under stress of starvation is in part responsible for the 
heaps of rubbish and rusty metal, for the general disorder 
and vileness, that still characterize broad acres of our factory 
districts. There is nothing short of the Alkali Desert that 
compares with the desolateness of the common American in- 
dustrial town. These qualities are indicative of the fact that 
we have centred attention not upon the process but upon the 
return; not upon the task but the emoluments; not upon what 
we can get out of our work but upon what we can achieve when 



THE CITY 13 

we get away from our work. Our industrialism has been in 
the grip of business, and our industrial cities, and their insti- 
tutions, have exhibited a major preoccupation with business. 
The coercive repression of an impersonal, mechanical tech- 
nique was compensated by the pervasive will-to-power — or 
at least will-to-comfort — of commercialism. 

We have shirked the problem of trying to live well in a 
regime that is devoted to the production of T-beams and tooth- 
brushes and TNT. As a result, we have failed to react cre- 
atively upon the environment with anything like the inspiration 
that one might have found in a group of mediaeval peasants 
building a cathedral. The urban worker escapes the mechani- 
cal routine of his daily job only to find an equally mechanical 
substitute for life and growth and experience in his amuse- 
ments. The Gay White Way with its stupendous blaze of 
lights, and Coney Island, with its fear-stimulating roller coast- 
ers and chute-the-chutes, are characteristic by-products of an 
age that has renounced the task of actively humanizing the 
machine, and of creating an environment in which all the fruit- 
ful impulses of the community may be expressed. The movies, 
the White Ways, and the Coney Islands, which almost every 
American city boasts in some form or other, are means of 
giving jaded and throttled people the sensations of living 
without the direct experience of life — a sort of spiritual mastur- 
bation. In short, we have had the alternative of humanizing 
the industrial city or de-humanizing the population. So far 
we have de-humanized the population. 

The external reactions against the industrial city came to a 
head in the World's Fair at Chicago. In that strange and 
giddy mixture of Parnassus and Coney Island was born a new 
conception of the city — a White City, spaciously designed, 
lighted by electricity, replete with monuments, crowned with 
public buildings, and dignified by a radiant architecture. The 
men who planned the exposition knew something about the 
better side of the spacious perspectives that Haussmann had 
designed for Napoleon III. Without taking into account the 
fundamental conditions of industrialism, or the salient facts 
of economics, they initiated what shortly came to be known 



14 CIVILIZATION 

as the City Beautiful movement. For a couple of decades 
Municipal Art societies were rampant. Their programme had 
the defects of the regime it attempted to combat. Its capital 
effort was to put on a front — to embellish Main Street and 
make it a more attractive thoroughfare. Here in aesthetics, 
as elsewhere in education, persisted the brahminical view of 
culture: the idea that beauty was something that could be 
acquired by any one who was willing to put up the cash; that 
it did not arise naturally out of the good life but was some- 
thing which could be plastered on impoverished life; in short, 
that it was a cosmetic. 

Until the Pittsburgh Survey of 1908 pricked a pin through 
superficial attempts at municipal improvement, those who * 
sought to remake the American city overlooked the necessity 
for rectifying its economic basis. The meanness, the spotty 
development, and the congestion of the American city was at 
least in some degree an index of that deep disease of realty 
speculation which had, as already noted, caused cities like 
Chicago to forfeit land originally laid aside for public uses. 
Because facts like these were ignored for the sake of some 
small, immediate result, the developments that the early re- 
formers were bold enough to outline still lie in the realms of 
hopeless fantasy — a fine play of the imagination, like Scad- 
der's prospectus of Eden. Here as elsewhere there have been 
numerous signs of promise during the last decade; but it is 
doubtful whether they are yet numerous enough or profound 
enough to alter the general picture. 

At best, the improvements that have been effected in the 
American city have not been central but subsidiary. They 
have been improvements, as Aristotle would have said, in the 
material bases of the good life: they have not been improve- 
ments in the art of living. The growth of the American 
city during the past century has meant the extension of paved 
streets and sewers and gas mains, and progressive heightening 
of office buildings and tenements. The outlay on pavements, 
sewers, electric lighting systems, and plumbing has been stu- 
pendous; but no matter what the Rotary Clubs and Chambers 
of Commerce may think of them, these mechanical ingenuities 
are not the indices of a civilization. There is a curious con- 



THE CITY IS 

fusion in America between growth and improvement. We use 
the phrase " bigger and better " as if the conjunction were 
inevitable. As a matter of fact, there is little evidence to show 
that the vast increase of population in every urban area has 
been accompanied by anything like the necessary increase of 
schools, universities, theatres, meeting places, parks, and so 
forth. The fact that in 1920 we had sixty-four cities with 
more than 100,000 population, thirty- three with more than 
200,000, and twelve with more than 500,000 does not mean 
that the resources of polity, culture, and art have been corre- 
spondingly on the increase. The growth of the American city 
has resulted less in the establishment of civilized standards of 
iife than in the extension of Suburbia. 

" Suburbia " is used here in both the accepted and in a more 
literal sense. On one hand I refer to the fact that the growth 
of the metropolis throws vast numbers of people into distant 
dormitories where, by and large, life is carried on without the 
discipline of rural occupations and without the cultural re- 
sources that the Central District of the city still retains in its 
art exhibitions^ theatres, concerts, and the like. But our me- 
tropolises produce Suburbia not merely by reason of the fact 
that the people who work in the offices, bureaus, and factories 
live as citizens in a distant territory, perhaps in another state: 
they likewise foster Suburbia in another sense. I mean that 
the quality of life for the great mass of people who live within 
the political boundaries of the metropolis itself is inferior to 
that which a city with an adequate equipment and a thorough 
realization of the creative needs of the community is capable 
of producing. In this sense, the " suburb " called Brookline 
is a genuine city; while the greater part of the " city of Bos- 
ton " is a suburb. We have scarcely begun to make an ade- 
quate distribution of libraries, meeting places, parks, gymnasia, 
and similar equipment, without which life in the city tends to 
be carried on at a low level of routine — physically as well as 
mentally. (The blatantly confidential advertisements of con- 
stipation remedies on all the hoardings tell a significant story.) 
At any reasonable allotment of park space, the Committee on 
Congestion in New York pointed out in 191 1, a greater number 
of acres was needed for parks on the lower East Side than 



1 6 CIVILIZATION 

was occupied by the entire population. This case is extreme 
but representative. 

It is the peculiarity of our metropolitan civilization, then, 
that in spite of vast resources drawn from the ends of the 
earth, it has an insufficient civic equipment, and what it does 
possess it uses only transiently. Those cities that have the 
beginnings of an adequate equipment, like New York — to 
choose no more invidious example — offer them chiefly to those 
engaged in travelling. As a traveller's city New York is near 
perfection. An association of cigar salesmen or an inter- 
national congress of social scientists, meeting in one of the 
auditoriums of a big hotel, dining together, mixing in the 
lounge, and finding recreation in the theatres hard by, discovers 
an environment that is ordered, within its limits, to a nicety. It 
is this hotel and theatre district that we must charitably think 
of when we are tempted to speak about the triumphs of the 
American city. Despite manifold defects that arise from want 
of planning, this is the real civic centre of America's Metropolis. 
What we must overlook in this characterization are the long 
miles of slum that stretch in front and behind and on each 
side of this district — neighbourhoods where, in spite of the 
redoubtable efforts of settlement workers, block organizers, and 
neighbourhood associations, there is no permanent institution, 
other than the public school or the sectarian church, to remind 
the inhabitants that they have a common life and a common 
destiny. 

Civic life, in fine, the life of intelligent association and com- 
mon action, a life whose faded pattern still lingers in the old 
New England town, is not something that we daily enjoy, as 
we work in an office or a factory. It is rather a temporary 
state that we occasionally achieve with a great deal of time, 
bother, and expense. The city is not around us, in our little 
town, suburb, or neighbourhood: it lies beyond us, at the end 
of a subway ride or a railway journey. We are citizens occa- 
sionally: we are suburbanites (denizens, idiots) by regular 
routine. Small wonder that bathtubs and heating systems and 
similar apparatus play such a large part in our conception of 
the good life. 

Metropolitanism in America represents, from the cultural 



THE CITY 17 

angle, a reaction against the uncouth and barren countryside 
that was skinned, rather than cultivated, by the restless, indi- 
vidualistic, self-assertive American pioneer. The perpetual 
drag to New York, and the endeavour of less favourably situ- 
ated cities to imitate the virtues and defects of New York, 
is explicable as nothing other than the desire to participate 
in some measure in the benefits of city life. Since we have 
failed up to the present to develop genuine regional cultures, 
those who do not wish to remain barbarians must become 
metropolitans. That means they must come to New York, 
or ape the ways that are fashionable in New York. Here 
opens the breach that has begun to widen between the me- 
tropolis and the countryside in America. The countryman, 
who cannot enjoy the advantages of the metropolis, who has 
no centre of his own to which he can point with pride, resents 
the privileges that the metropolitan enjoys. Hence the peri- 
odical crusades of our State Legislatures, largely packed with 
rural representatives, against the vices, corruptions, and follies 
which the countryman enviously looks upon as the peculiar 
property of the big city. Perhaps the envy and resentment 
of the farming population is due to a genuine economic griev- 
ance against the big cities — especially against their banks, 
insurance companies, and speculative middlemen. Should the 
concentration of power, glory, and privilege in the metropolis 
continue, it is possible that the city will find itself subject to 
an economic siege. If our cities cannot justify their existence 
by their creative achievements, by their demonstration of the 
efficacy and grace of corporate life, it is doubtful whether they 
will be able to persuade the country to support them, once the 
purely conventional arrangements by means of which the city 
browbeats the countryside are upset. This, however, brings 
us to the realm of social speculation; and he who would enter 
it must abandon everything but hope. 

Metropolitanism is of two orders. At its partial best it is 
exhibited in New York, the literal mother city of America. 
In its worst aspect it shows itself in the sub-metropolises which 
have been spawning so prolifically since the 'eighties. If we 
are to understand the capacities and limitations of the other 



i8 CIVILIZATION 

great cities in America, we must first weigh the significance of 
New York. 

The forces that have made New York dominant are in- 
herent in our financial and industrial system; elsewhere those 
same forces, working in slightly different ways, created Lon- 
don, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Petrograd, and Moscow. 
What happened in the industrial towns of America was that 
the increments derived from land, capital, and association went, 
not to the enrichment of the local community, but to those who 
had a legal title to the land and the productive machinery. In 
other words, the gains that were made in Pittsburgh, Spring- 
field, Dayton, and a score of other towns that became impor- 
tant in the industrial era were realized largely in New York, 
whose position had been established, before the turn of the 
century, as the locus of trade and finance. (New York passed 
the 500,000 mark in the 1850 census.) This is why, perhaps, 
during the 'seventies and 'eighties, decades of miserable de- 
pression throughout the industrial centres, there were signs of 
hope and promise in New York: the Museums of Art and 
Natural History were built: Life and Puck and a batch of 
newspapers were founded: the Metropolitan Opera House and 
Carnegie Hall were established: and a dozen other evidences 
of a vigorous civic life appeared. In a short time New York 
became the glass of fashion and the mould of form, and through 
the standardization, specialization, and centralization which 
accompany the machine process the Metropolis became at 
length the centre of advertising, the lender of farm mort- 
gages, the distributor of boiler-plate news, the headquarters 
of the popular magazine, the publishing centre, and finally the 
chief disseminator of plays and motion pictures in America. 
The educational foundations which the exploiter of the Kodak 
has established at Rochester were not characteristic of the early 
part of the industrial period — otherwise New York's eminence 
might have been briskly challenged before it had become, after 
its fashion, unchallengeable. The increment from Mr. Car- 
negie's steel works built a hall of music for New York long 
before it created the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. In 
other words, the widespread effort of the American provincial 
to leave his industrial city for New York comes to something 



THE CITY 19 

like an attempt to get back from New York what had been 
previously filched from the industrial city. 

The future of our cities depends upon how permanent are 
the forces which drain money, energy, and brains from the vari- 
ous regions in America into the twelve great cities that now 
dominate the countryside, and in turn drain the best that is in 
these sub-metropolises to New York. To-day our cities are at 
a crossing of the ways. Since the 1910 census a new tendency 
has begun to manifest itself, and the cities that have grown 
the fastest are those of a population from 25,000 to 100,000. 
Quantitatively, that is perhaps a good sign. It may indicate 
the drift to Suburbia is on the wane. One finds it much 
harder, however, to gauge the qualitative capacities of the 
new regime; much more difficult to estimate the likelihood of 
building up, within the next generation or two, genuine regional 
cultures to take the place of pseudo-national culture which 
now mechanically emanates from New York. So far our pro- 
vincial culture has been inbred and sterile: our provincial 
cities have substituted boosting for achievement, fanciful 
speculation for intelligent planning, and a zaniacal optimism 
for constructive thought. These habits have made them an 
easy prey to the metropolis, for at its lowest ebb there has 
always been a certain amount of organized intelligence and 
cultivated imagination in New York — if only because it is the 
chief point of contact between Europe and America. Gopher 
Prairie has yet to take to heart the fable about the frog 
that tried to inflate himself to the size of a bull. When Gopher 
Prairie learns its lessons from Bergen and Augsburg and Mont- 
pellier and Grenoble, the question of " metropolitanism versus 
regionalism " may become as active in America as it is now in 
Europe. 

Those of us who are metropolitans may be tempted to think 
that the hope for civilization in America is bound up with the 
continuance of metropolitanism. That is essentially a cockney 
view of culture and society, however, and our survey of the 
development of the city in America should have done some- 
thing to weaken its self-confident complacence. Our metropoli- 
tan civilization is not a success. It is a different kind of wil- 
derness from that which Vv^e have deflowered — but the feral 



20 CIVILIZATION 

rather than the humane quality is dominant: it is still a wilder- 
ness. The cities of America must learn to remould our 
mechanical and financial regime; for if metropolitanism con- 
tinues they are probably destined to fall by its weight. 

Lewis Mumford 



POLITICS 

No person shall be a Representative who . . . shall not, when 
elected, be an inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen. 
. . . No person shall be a Senator who . . . shall not, when 
elected, be an inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen. 

SPECIALISTS in political archaeology will recognize these 
sentences: they are from Article I, Sections 2 and 3, of 
the constitution of the United States. I have heard and for- 
gotten how they got there; no doubt the cause lay in the fierce 
jealousy of the States. But whatever the fact, I have a notion 
that there are few provisions of the constitution that have had 
a more profound effect upon the character of practical politics 
in the Republic, or^ indirectly, upon the general colour of Amer- 
ican thinking in the political department. They have made 
steadily for parochialism in legislation, for the security and 
prosperity of petty local bosses and machines, for the multipli- 
cation of pocket and rotten boroughs of the worst sort, and, 
above all, for the progressive degeneration of the honesty and 
honour of representatives. They have greased the ways for 
the trashy and ignoble fellow who aspires to get into Congress, 
and they have blocked them for the man of sense, dignity, and 
self-respect. More, perhaps, than any other single influence 
they have been responsible for the present debauched and 
degraded condition of the two houses, and particularly of the 
lower one. Find me the worst ass in Congress, and I'll show 
you a man they have helped to get there and to stay there. 
Find me the most shameless scoundrel, and I'll show you 
another. 

No such centripedal mandate, as far as I have been able to 
discover, is in the fundamental law of any other country prac- 
tising the representative system. An Englishman, if ambition 
heads him toward St. Stephen's, may go hunting for a willing 
constituency wherever the hunting looks best, and if he fails 



22 CIVILIZATION 

in the Midlands he may try again in the South, or in the 
North, or in Scotland or Wales. A Frenchman of like dreams 
has the same privilege; the only condition, added after nine- 
teen years of the Third Republic, is that he may not be a can- 
didate in two or more arrondissentents at once. And so with 
a German, an Italian, or a Spaniard. But not so with an 
American. He must be an actual inhabitant of the State he 
aspires to represent at Washington. More, he mtist be, in all 
save extraordinary cases, an actual inhabitant of the congres- 
sional district — for here, by a characteristic American process, 
the fundamental law is sharpened by custom. True enough, 
this last requirement is not laid down by the constitution. It 
would be perfectly legal for the thirty-fifth New York district, 
centring at Syracuse, to seek its congressman in Manhattan, or 
even at Sing Sing. In various iconoclastic States, in fact, the 
thing has been occasionally done. But not often; not often 
enough to produce any appreciable effect. The typical con- 
gressman remains a purely local magnifico, the gaudy cock of 
some small and usually far from appetizing barnyard. His 
rank and dignity as a man are measured by provincial stand- 
ards of the most puerile sort, and his capacity to discharge the 
various and onerous duties of his office is reckoned almost ex- 
clusively in terms of his ability to hold his grip upon the local 
party machine. 

If he has genuine ability, it is a sort of accident. If he is 
thoroughly honest, it is next door to a miracle. Of the 430- 
odd representatives who carry on so diligently and obscenely at 
Washington, making laws and determining policies for the 
largest free nation ever seen in the world, there are not two 
dozen whose views upon any subject under the sun carry any 
weight whatsoever outside their own bailiwicks, and there are 
not a dozen who rise to anything approaching unmistakable 
force and originality. They are, in the overwhelming main, 
shallow fellows, ignorant of the grave matters they deal with 
and too stupid to learn. If, as is often proposed, the United 
States should adopt the plan of parliamentary responsibility 
and the ministry should be recruited from the lower house, 
then it would be difficult, without a radical change in election 
methods, to fetch up even such pale talents and modest de- 



POLITICS 23 

cencies as were assembled for their cabinets by Messrs. Wilson 
and Harding. The better sort of congressmen, to be sure, 
acquire after long service a good deal of technical proficiency. 
They know the traditions and precedents of the two houses; 
they can find their way in and out of every rathole in the 
Capitol; they may be trusted to carry on the legislative routine 
in a more or less shipshape manner. Of such sort are the spe- 
cialists paraded in the newspapers — on the tariff, on military 
affairs, on foreign relations, and so on. They come to know, 
in time, almost as much as a Washington correspondent, or one 
of their own committee clerks. But the average congressman 
lifts himself to no such heights of sagacity. He is content to 
be led by the fugelmen and bellwethers. Examine him at 
leisure, and you will find that he is incompetent and imbecile, 
and not only incompetent and imbecile, but also incurably 
dishonest. The first principles of civilized law-making are 
quite beyond him; he ends, as he began, a local politician, inter- 
ested only in jobs. His knowledge is that of a third-rate coun- 
try lawyer — which he often is in fact. His intelligence is that 
of a country newspaper editor, or evangelical divine. His 
standards of honour are those of a country banker — which he 
also often is. To demand sense of such a man, or wide and 
accurate information, or a delicate feeling for the public and 
private proprieties, is to strain his parts beyond endurance. 

The constitution, of course, stops with Congress, but its 
influence is naturally powerful within the States, and one finds 
proofs of the fact on all sides. It is taking an herculean effort 
everywhere to break down even the worst effects of this influ- 
ence; the prevailing tendency is still to discover a mysterious 
virtue in the office-holder who was born and raised in the State, 
or county, or city, or ward. The judge must come from the 
bar of the court he is to adorn; the mayor must be part and 
parcel of the local machine; even technical officers, such as en- 
gineers and health commissioners, lie under the constitutional 
blight. The thing began as a belief in local self-government, 
the oldest of all the sure cures for despotism. But it has grad- 
ually taken on the character of government by local politicians, 
which is to say, by persons quite unable to comprehend the 
most elemental problems of State and nation, and unfitted by 



24 CIVILIZATION 

nature to deal with them honestly and patriotically, even if they 
could comprehend them. Just as prohibition was forced upon 
the civilized minorities collected in the great cities against their 
most vigorous and persistent opposition, so the same minorities, 
when it comes to intra-state affairs, are constantly at the mercy 
of predatory bands of rural politicians. If there is any large 
American city whose peculiar problems are dealt with compe- 
tently and justly by its State legislature, then I must confess 
that twenty years in journalism have left me ignorant of it. 
An unending struggle for fairer dealing goes on in every State 
that has large cities, and every concession to their welfare is 
won only at the cost of gigantic effort. The State legislature 
is never intelligent; it represents only the average mind of the 
county bosses, whose sole concern is with jobs. The machines 
that they represent are wholly political, but they have no politi- 
cal principles in any rational sense. Their one purpose and 
function is to maintain their adherents in the public offices, 
or to obtain for them in some other way a share of the State 
funds. They are quite willing* to embrace any new doctrine, 
however fantastic, or to abandon any old one, however long 
supported, if only the business will promote their trade and 
so secure their power. 

This concentration of the ultimate governmental authority 
in the hands of small groups of narrow, ignorant, and uncon- 
scionable manipulators tends inevitably to degrade the actual 
office-holder, or, what is the same thing, to make office-holding 
prohibitive to all men not already degraded. It is almost 
impossible to imagine a man of genuine self-respect and dignity 
offering himself as a candidate for the lower house — or, since 
the direct primary and direct elections brought it down to the 
common level, for the upper house^ — in the average American 
constituency. His necessary dealings with the electors them- 
selves, and with the idiots who try more or less honestly to lead 
them, would be revolting enough, but even worse would be his 
need of making terms with the professional politicians of his 
party — the bosses of the local machine. These bosses natu- 
rally make the most of the constitutional limitation; it works 
powerfully in their favour. A local notable, in open revolt 
against them, may occasionally beat them by appealing directly 



POLITICS 25 

to the voters, but nine times out of ten, when there is any sign 
of such a catastrophe^ they are prompt to perfume the ticket 
by bringing forth another local notable who is safe and sane, 
which is to say, subservient and reliable. The thing is done 
constantly; it is a matter of routine; it accounts for most 
of the country bankers, newspaper owners, railroad lawyers, 
proprietors of cement works, and other such village bigwigs 
in the lower house. Here everything runs to the advantage 
of the bosses. It is not often that the notable in rebellion 
is gaudy enough to blind the plain people to the high merits of 
his more docile opponent. They see him too closely and know 
him too well. He shows none of that exotic charm which ac- 
counts, on a different plane, for exogamy. There is no strange- 
ness, no mysteriousness, above all, no novelty about him. 

It is my contention that this strangle-hold of the local ma- 
chines would be vastly less firm if it could be challenged, not 
only by rebels within the constituency, but also by salient men 
from outside. The presidential campaigns, indeed, offer plenty 
of direct proof of it. In these campaigns it is a commonplace 
for strange doctrines and strange men to force themselves upon 
the practical politicians in whole sections of the country, de- 
spite their constant effort to keep their followers faithful to 
the known. All changes, of whatever sort, whether in leaders 
or in ideas, are opposed by such politicians at the start, but 
time after time they are compelled to acquiesce and to hurrah. 
Bryan, as every one knows, forced himself upon the Democratic 
party by appealing directly to the people; the politicians, in 
the main, were bitterly against him until further resistance 
was seen to be useless, and they attacked him again the moment 
he began to weaken, and finally disposed of him. So with 
Wilson. It would be absurd to say that the politicians of his 
party — and especially the bosses of the old machines in the 
congressional districts — were in favour of him in 191 2. They 
were actually against him almost unanimously. He got past 
their guard and broke down their resolution to nominate some 
more trustworthy candidate by operating directly upon the 
emotions of the voters. For some reason never sufficiently 
explained he became the heir of the spirit of rebellion raised 
by Bryan sixteen years before, and was given direct and very 



26 CIVILIZATION 

effective aid by Bryan himself. Roosevelt saddled himself 
upon the Republican party in exactly the same way. The 
bosses made heroic efforts to sidetrack him, to shelve him, to 
get rid of him by any means short of homicide, but his bold 
enterprises and picturesque personality enchanted the people, 
and if it had not been for the extravagant liberties that he took 
with his popularity in later years he might have retained it until 
his death. 

The same possibility of unhorsing the machine politicians, I 
believe, exists in even the smallest electoral unit. All that is 
needed is the chance to bring in the man. Podunk cannot pro- 
duce him herself, save by a sort of miracle. If she has actually 
hatched him, he is far away by the time he.has come to his 
full stature and glitter — in the nearest big city, in Chicago 
or New York. Podunk is proud of him, and many other 
Podunks, perhaps, are stirred by his ideas, his attitudes, his 
fine phrases — but he lives, say, in some Manhattan congres- 
sional district which has the Hon. Patrick Googan as its repre- 
sentative by divine right, and so there is no way to get him 
into the halls of Congress. In his place goes the Hon. John 
P. Balderdash, State's attorney for five years. State senator for 
two terms, and county judge for a brief space — and always a 
snide and petty fellow, always on the best of terms with the 
local bosses, always eager for a job on any terms they lay down. 
The yokels vote for the Hon. Mr. Balderdash, not because they 
admire him, but because their only choice is between him and 
the Hon. James Bosh. If anything even remotely resembling 
a first-rate man could come into the contest, if it were lawful 
for them to rid themselves of their recurrent dilemma by so- 
liciting the interest of such a man, then they would often 
enough rise in their might and compel their parish overlords, 
as the English put it, to adopt him. But the constitution pro- 
tects these overlords in their business, and in the long run the 
voters resign all thought of deliverance. Thus the combat 
remains one between small men, and interest in it dies out. 
Most of the men who go to the lower house are third-raters, 
even in their own narrow bailiwicks. In my own congressional 
district, part of a large city, there has never been a candidate 
of any party, during the twenty years that I have voted, who 



POLITICS 27 

was above the intellectual level of a corner grocer. No suc- 
cessful candidate of that district has ever made a speech in 
.Congress (or out of it) worth hearing, or contributed a single 
sound idea otherwise to the solution of any public problem. 
One and all, they have confined themselves exclusively to the 
trade in jobs. One and all, they have been ciphers in the house 
and before the country. 

Well, perhaps I labour my point too much. It is, after all, 
not important. The main thing is the simple fact that the 
average representative from my district is typical of Congress 
— that, if anything, he is superior to the normal congressman 
of these, our days. That normal congressman, as year chases 
year, tends to descend to such depths of puerility, to such 
abysses of petty shysterism, that he becomes offensive alike to 
the intelligence and to the nose. His outlook, when it is hon- 
est, is commonly childish — and it is very seldom honest. The 
product of a political system which puts all stress upon the 
rewards of public office, he is willing to make any sacrifice, 
of dignity, of principle, of honour, to hold and have those 
rewards. He has no courage, no intellectual amour pro pre, no 
ardent belief in anything save his job, and the jobs of his 
friends. It was easy for Wilson to beat him into line on the 
war issue; it was easy for the prohibitionists to intimidate and 
stampede him ; it is easy for any resolute man or group of men 
to do likewise. I read the Congressional Record faithfully, 
and have done so for years. In the Senate debates, amid 
oceans of tosh, I occasionally encounter a flash of wit or a 
gleam of sense; direct elections have not yet done their work. 
But in the lower house there is seldom anything save a gar- 
rulous and intolerable imbecility. The discussion of measures 
of the utmost importance — bills upon which the security and 
prosperity of the whole nation depend — is carried on in the 
manner of the chautauqua and the rural stump. Entire days 
go by without a single congressman saying anything as intel- 
ligent, say, as the gleams that one sometimes finds in the New 
York Herald, or even in the New York Times. The newspa- 
pers, unfortunately, give no adequate picture of the business. 
No American journal reports the daily debates comprehen- 
sively, as the debates in the House of Commons are reported 



28 CIVILIZATION 

by the London Times, Daily Telegraph, and Morning Post. 
All one hears of, as a rule, is the action taken, and only too 
often the action taken, even when it is reported fairly, is un- 
intelligible without the antecedent discussion. If any one who 
reads this wants to know what such a discussion is like, then 
I counsel him to go to the nearest public library, ask for the 
Record for 191 8, and read the debate in the lower house on the 
Volstead Act. It was, I believe, an average debate, and on a 
subject of capital importance. It was, from first to last, almost 
fabulous in its evasion of the plain issue, its incredible timor- 
ousness and stupidity, its gross mountebankery and dishonesty. 
Not twenty men spoke in it as men of honour and self-respect. 
Not ten brought any idea into it that was not a silly idea and 
a stale one. 

That debate deserves a great deal more study than it will 
ever get from the historians of American politics, nearly all of 
whom, whether they lean to the right or to the left, are be- 
dazzled by the economic interpretation of history, and so seek 
to account for all political phenomena in terms of crop move- 
ments, wage scales, and panics in Wall Street. It seems to me 
that that obsession blinds them to a fact of the first importance, 
to wit, the fact that political ideas, under a democracy as under 
a monarchy, originate above quite as often as they originate 
below, and that their popularity depends quite as much upon 
the special class interests of professional politicians as it de- 
pends upon the underlying economic interests of the actual 
voters. It is, of course, true, as I have argued, that the people 
can force ideas upon the politicians, given powerful leaders of 
a non-political (or, at all events, non-machine) sort, but it is 
equally true that there are serious impediments to the process, 
and that it is not successful very often. As a matter of every- 
day practice the rise and fall of political notions is determined 
by the self-interest of the practical politicians of the country, 
and though they naturally try to bring the business into har- 
mony with any great popular movements that may be in prog- 
ress spontaneously, they by no means wait and beg for man- 
dates when none are vociferously forthcoming, but go ahead 
bravely on their own account, hoping to drag public opinion 
with them and so safeguard their jobs. Such is the origin of 



POLITICS 29 

many affecting issues, later held dear by millions of the plain 
people. Such was the process whereby prohibition was foisted 
upon the nation by constitutional amendment, to the dismay of 
the solid majority opposed to it and to the surprise of the 
minority in favour of it. 

What lay under the sudden and melodramatic success of the 
prohibitionist agitators was simply their discovery of the in- 
curable cowardice and venality of the normal American poli- 
tician — their shrewd abandonment of logical and evidential 
propaganda for direct political action. For years their cause 
had languished. Now and then a State or part of a State 
went dry, but often it went wet again a few years later. Those 
were the placid days of white-ribbon rallies, of wholesale 
pledge-signings, of lectures by converted drunkards, of orgiastic 
meetings in remote Baptist and Methodist churches, of a child- 
ish reliance upon arguments that fetched only drunken men 
and their wives, and so grew progressively feebler as the coun- 
try became more sober. The thing was scarcely even a 
nuisance; it tended steadily to descend to the level of a joke. 
The prohibitionist vote for President hung around a quarter 
of a million ; it seemed impossible to pull it up to a formidable 
figure, despite the stupendous labours of thousands of eloquent 
dervishes, lay and clerical, male and female. But then, out of 
nowhere, came the Anti-Saloon League, and — sis! boom! ah! 
Then came the sudden shift of the fire from the people to the 
politicians — and at once there was rapid progress. The people 
could only be wooed and bamboozled, but the politicians could 
be threatened; their hold upon their jobs could be shaken; they 
could be converted at wholesale and by jorce majeure. The 
old prohibition weepers and gurglers were quite incapable of 
this enterprise, but the new janissaries of the Anti-Saloon 
League — sharp lawyers, ecclesiastics too ambitious to pound 
mere pulpits, outlaw politicians seeking a way back to the 
trough — were experts at every trick and dodge it demanded. 
They understood the soul of the American politician. To him 
they applied the economic interpretation of history, resolutely 
and with a great deal of genial humour. They knew that his 
whole politics, his whole philosophy, his whole concept of hon- 
esty and honour, was embraced in his single and insatiable 



30 CIVILIZATION 

yearning for a job, and they showed him how, by playing with 
them, he could get it and keep it, and how, by standing against 
them, he could lose it. Prohibition was rammed into the con- 
stitution by conquering the politicians; the people in general 
were amazed when the thing was accomplished; it may take 
years to reconcile them to it. 

It was the party system that gave the Anti-Saloon League 
manipulators their chance, and they took advantage of it with 
great boldness and cleverness. The two great parties divide 
the country almost equally; it is difficult to predict, in a given 
year, whether the one or the other musters the most votes. 
This division goes down into the lowest electoral units; even 
in those backward areas where one party has divine grace and 
the other is of the devil there are factional differences that 
amount to the same thing. In other words, the average Ameri- 
can politician is never quite sure of his job. An election (and, 
if not an election, then a primary) always exposes him to a 
definite hazard, and he is eager to diminish it by getting help 
from outside his own following, at whatever cost to the princi- 
ples he commonly professes. Here lies the opportunity for 
minorities willing to trade on a realistic political basis. In the 
old days the prohibitionists refused to trade, and in conse- 
quence they were disregarded, for their fidelity to their own 
grotesque candidates protected the candidates of both the regu- 
lar parties. But with the coming of the Anti-Saloon League 
they abandoned this fidelity and began to dicker in a forthright 
and unashamed manner, quickly comprehensible to all profes- 
sional pohticians. That is, they asked for a pledge on one 
specific issue, and were willing to swallow any commitment on 
other issues. If Beelzebub, running on one ticket, agreed to 
support prohibition, and the Archangel Gabriel, running on an- 
other, found himself entertaining conscientious doubts, they 
were instantly and solidly for Beelzebub, and they not only 
gave him the votes that they directly controlled, but they also 
gave him the benefit of a campaign support that was ruthless, 
pertinacious, extraordinarily ingenious, and overwhelmingly ef- 
fective. Beelzebub, whatever his swinishness otherwise, was 
bathed in holy oils; Gabriel's name became a thing to scare 
children. 



POLITICS 31 

Obviously, the support thus offered was particularly tempt- 
ing to a politician who found himself facing public suspicion 
for his general political practices — in brief, to the worst type 
of machine professional. Such a politician is always acutely 
aware that it is not positive merit that commonly gets a man 
into public office in the United States, but simply disvulnera- 
bility. Even when they come to nominate a President, the 
qualities the two great parties seek are chiefly the negative 
ones; they want, not a candidate of forceful and immovable 
ideas, but one whose ideas are vague and not too tenaciously 
held, and in whose personality there is nothing to alarm or 
affront the populace. Of two candidates, that one usually wins 
who least arouses the distrusts and suspicions of the great 
masses of undifferentiated men. This advantage of the safe 
and sane, the colourless and unprovocative, the apparently 
stodgy and commonplace man extends to the most trivial con- 
tests, and politicians are keen to make use of it. Thus the job- 
seeker with an aura of past political misdemeanour about him 
was eager to get the Christian immunity bath that the pro- 
hibitionists offered him so generously, and in the first years of 
their fight they dealt almost exclusively with such fellows. 
He, on his side, promised simply to vote for prohibition — not 
even, in most cases, to pretend to any personal belief in it. 
The prohibitionists, on their side, promised to deliver the votes 
of their followers to him on election day, to cry him up as one 
saved by a shining light, and, most important of all, to denounce 
his opponent as an agent of hell. He was free, by this agree- 
ment, to carry on his regular political business as usual. The 
prohibitionists asked no patronage of him. They didn't afflict 
him with projects for other reforms. All they demanded was 
that he cast his vote as agreed upon when the signal was given 
to him. 

At the start, of course, such scoundrels frequently violated 
their agreements. In the South, in particular^ dry legislature 
after dry legislature sold out to the liquor lobby, which, in those 
days, still had plenty of money. An assemblyman would be 
elected with the aid of the prohibitionists, make a few maudlin 
speeches against the curse of drink, and then, at the last min- 
ute, vote wet for some thin and specious reason, or for no 



32 CIVILIZATION 

avowed reason at all. But the prohibition manipulators, as I 
have said, were excellent politicians, and so they knew how 
to put down that sort of treason. At the next election they 
transferred their favour to the opposition candidate, and in- 
asmuch as he had seen the traitor elected at the last election 
he was commonly very eager to do business. The punishment 
for the treason was condign and merciless. The dry rabble- 
rousers, lay and clerical, trumpeted news of it from end to end 
of the constituency. What was a new and gratifying disvul- 
nerability was transformed into a vulnerability of the worst 
sort; the recreant one became the county Harry Thaw, Oscar 
Wilde^ Captain Boy-Ed, and Debs. A few such salutary ex- 
amples, and treason became rare. The prohibitionists, indeed, 
came to prefer dealing with such victims of their reprisals. 
They could trust them perfectly, once the lesson had been 
learned; they were actually more trustworthy than honest be- 
lievers, for the latter usually had ideas of their own and inter- 
fered with the official plans of campaign. Thus, in the end, 
the professional politicians of both parties came under the yoke. 
The final battle in Congress transcended all party lines ; demo- 
crats and republicans fought alike for places on the band- 
wagon. The spectacle offered a searching and not unhumor- 
ous commentary on the party system, and on the honour of 
American politicians no less. Two-thirds, at least, of the votes 
for the amendment were cast by men who did not believe in it, 
and who cherished a hearty hope, to the last moment, that some 
act of God would bring about its defeat. 

Such holocausts of frankness and decency are certainly not 
rare in American politics; on the contrary, they glow with 
normalcy. The typical legislative situation among us — and 
the typical administrative situation as well — is one in which 
men wholly devoid of inner integrity, facing a minority that is 
resolutely determined to get its will, yield up their ideas, their 
freedom, and their honour in order to save their jobs. I say 
administrative situation as well; what I mean is that in these 
later days the pusillanimity of the actual law-maker is fully 
matched by the pusillanimity of the enforcing officer, whether 
humble assistant district attorney or powerful judge. The 
war, with its obliteration of customary pretences and loosening 



POLITICS 33 

of fundamental forces, threw up the whole process into high 
relief. For nearly two long years there was a complete aban- 
donment of sense and self-respect. Rowelled and intimidated 
by minorities that finally coalesced into a frantic majority, 
legislators allowed themselves to be forced into imbecility after 
imbecility, and administrative officers, including some of the 
highest judges in the land, followed them helter-skelter. In 
the lower house of Congress there was one man — already for- 
gotten — who showed the stature of a man. He resigned his 
seat and went home to his self-respect. The rest had no 
self-respect to go home to. Eager beyond all to hold their 
places, at whatever cost to principle, and uneasily conscious of 
their vulnerability to attack, however frenzied and unjust, they 
surrendered abjectly and repeatedly — to the White House, to 
the newspapers, to any group enterprising enough to issue or- 
ders to them and resolute enough to flourish weapons before 
them. It was a spectacle full of indecency — there are even 
congressmen who blush when they think of it to-day — but 
it was nevertheless a spectacle that was typical. The fortunes 
of politics, as they now run, make it overwhelmingly probable 
that every new recruit to public office will be just such a pol- 
troon. The odds are enormously in favour of him, and enor- 
mously against the man of honour. Such a man of honour 
may occasionally drift in, taken almost unawares by some 
pohtical accident, but it is the pushing, bumptious, uncon- 
scionable bounder who is constantly fighting to get in, and only 
too often he succeeds. The rules of the game are made to fit 
his taste and his talents. He can survive as a hog can survive 
in the swill-yard. 

Go to the Congressional Directory and investigate the origins 
and past performances of the present members of the lower 
house — our t3^ical assemblage of typical politicians, the cor- 
nerstone of our whole representative system, the symbol of our 
democracy. You will find that well over half of them are 
obscure lawyers, school-teachers, and mortgage-sharks out of 
almost anonymous towns — men of common traditions, sordid 
aspirations, and no attainments at all. One and all, the mem- 
bers of this majority — and it is constant, no matter what party 
is in power — are plastered with the brass ornaments of the 



34 CIVILIZATION 

more brummagem fraternal orders. One and all, they are de- 
void of any contact with what passes for culture, even in their 
remote bailiwicks. One and all their careers are bare of 
civilizing influences. . . . Such is the American Witenagemot 
in this 146th year of the Republic. Such are the men who 
make the laws that all of us must obey, and who carry on our 
dealings with the world. Go to their debates, and you will 
discover what equipment they bring to their high business. 
What they know of sound literature is what one may get out of 
McGuffey's Fifth Reader. What they know of political sci- 
ence is the nonsense preached in the chautauquas and on the 
stump. What they know of history is the childish stuff taught 
in grammar-schools. What they know of the arts and sciences — 
of all the great body of knowledge that is the chief intellectual 
baggage of modern man — is absolutely nothing. 

H. L. Mencken 



JOURNALISM 

ACCORDING to the World Almanac for 192 1 the daily cir- 
culation of newspapers in the big cities of the United 
States in 19 14 (evidently the most recent year for which the 
figures have been compiled) was more than forty million. For 
the six months ending April i, 1920, the average daily circu- 
lation of five morning newspapers and eleven evening news- 
papers in Greater New York City was, as shown by sworn 
statements, more than three and a third million. These sta- 
tistics cover only daily newspapers, not weekly or monthly 
journals; and the figures for New York do not include papers 
in languages other than English. The American certainly 
buys newspapers. To what extent he reads them it is impos- 
sible to determine. But we may fairly assume that the great 
majority of literate inhabitants of the United States of all ages 
are every day subjected in some measure to the influence of the 
newspaper. No other institution approaches the newspaper in 
universality, persistence, continuity of influence. Not the 
public school, with all other schools added to it, has such 
power over the national mind; for in the lives of most people 
formal schooling is of relatively short duration, ceasing with 
adolescence or earlier. The church? Millions of people never 
go to church, and the day when the clergy dominated human 
thought is gone for ever. If we add to the daily press the 
weekly and monthly periodicals, with a total circulation per 
issue of two hundred million (for the year 1914), we shall not 
be far wrong in saying that the journalist, with the powers 
behind him, has more to do, for good or for evil, than the 
member of any other profession, in creating and shaping the 
thoughts of the multitude. Compared with him the teacher, 
the preacher, the artist, the politician, the man of science, are 
restricted, interrupted, indirect in reaching the minds of their 
fellow-men. 

So that in estimating the capacities and contents of the 

35 



36 CIVILIZATION 

American mind, which we have no means of lining up in its 
hundred million individual manifestations and examining di- 
rectly, an analysis of the American newspaper is a fair rough- 
and-ready method. What everybody reads does not tell the 
whole story of what everybody is, but it tells a good deal. 
Moreover, it is not necessary to analyze any one newspaper 
or to separate its clientele from that of any other newspaper. 
For though everybody knows that the New York Tribune and 
the New York World have distinct qualities which differentiate 
them from each other, that some papers are better and some 
are worse, yet on the whole the American newspaper is amaz- 
ingly uniform from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. It 
is, indeed, a more or less unified institution fed by the same 
news services and dominated by kindred financial interests. 
If you travel much, as actors do, without interest in local 
affairs, when you go to the hotel news-stand in the morning, 
you cannot tell from the general aspect of the newspaper you 
pick up what city you are in; and in a small city it is likely 
to be a metropolitan paper that has come a hundred miles or 
more during the night. Indeed, this is the first thing to be 
learned about the American from a study of his newspapers, 
that he lacks individuality, is tediously uniform, and cut ac- 
cording to one intellectual pattern. He may have his " fa- 
vourite " newspaper, and with no sense that his confession of 
habitude is shameful he may write the editor that he has read 
it constantly for forty years. But if it goes out of existence, 
like his favourite brand of chewing-gum or cigarettes, there is 
no aching void which cannot be comfortably filled by a surviv- 
ing competitor. Editors, except those in charge of local news, 
move with perfect ease from one city to another; it is the same 
old job at a different desk. 

The standardization of the newspaper reader and the stand- 
ardization of the journalist are two aspects of the same thing. 
As a citizen, a workman, a human being, the journalist is sim- 
ply one of us, a victim of the conformity which has over- 
whelmed the American. When we speak of the influence of 
the journalist, we are not speaking of an individual, but of " the 
powers behind him," of which he is nothing but the wage- 
earning servant, as impotent and unimportant, considered as 



JOURNALISM 37 

an individual, as a mill-hand. Journalism in America is no 
longer a profession, through which a man can win to a place 
of real dignity among his neighbours. If we had a Horace 
Greeley to-day, he would not be editor of a newspaper. He 
would not wish to be, and he would not be allowed to be. Cer- 
tainly his vigorous integrity would not be tolerated in the mod- 
ern unworthy successor of the newspaper which he founded. 
The editor of a newspaper is no doubt often a man of intel- 
ligence and experience and he may be well paid, like the man- 
ager of a department store; but he is usually submerged in 
anonymity except that from time to time the law requires the 
newspaper to publish his name. His subordinates, assistant 
editors, newswriters, reporters, and the rest, are as nameless 
as floor-walkers, shipping clerks, salesladies, and ladies en- 
gaged in more ancient formsof commerce. 

It is true that during the last generation there has been 
a tendency in the newspaper to " feature " individuals, such 
as cartoonists, conductors of columns, writers on sport, drama- 
tic critics, and so on. But these men are artists, some of them 
very clever, who have nothing to do with the news but con- 
tribute to the paper its vaudeville entertainment. During 
the war there was a great increase in the amount of signed 
cable matter and correspondence. This was due to the neces- 
sity of the prosperous newspaper to show its enterprise and to 
cajole its readers into believing that it had men of special ability 
in close touch with diplomats and major-generals collecting and 
cabling at great expense intimate information and expert opin- 
ion. The circumstances were so difficult that the wisest and 
most honest man could not do much, except lose his position, 
and nobody will blame the correspondents. But it is signifi- 
cant that not a single American correspondent emerged from 
the conflict who is memorable, from the point of view of a 
more or less careful reader, as having been different from the 
rest. If from a miscellaneous collection of clippings we should 
cut off the dates, the alleged place of origin and the names 
of the correspondents, nobody but an editor with a long and 
detailed memory could tell t'other from which, or be sure 
whether the despatch was from Mr. Jones, the special corre- 
spondent of the Christian Science Monitor (copyright by the 



38 CIVILIZATION 

Chicago News) or an anonymous cable from the London office 
of the Associated Press. And even the editor, who may be 
assumed to know the names of hundreds of his colleagues and 
competitors, would begin his attempt at identification by ex- 
amining the style of type to see if it looked like a column from 
the Sun or from the World. Almost all the war news was a 
hopeless confusion of impressions, of reports of what some- 
body said somebody else, " of unquestionable authority," had 
heard from reliable sources, and of sheer mendacity adapted to 
the momentary prejudices of the individual managing editor, 
the American press as a whole, and the American people. And 
this is a rough recipe for all the news even in times of peace, 
for the war merely aggravated the prevalent diseases of the 
newspapers. 

Since the purpose of this book is to discuss peculiarly Ameri- 
can characteristics^ it should be said at once that the tendency 
of the newspaper to obliterate the journalist as a person imme- 
diately responsible to the public is not confined to America. 
Economic conditions in Europe and America are fundamentally 
alike, and the modern newspaper in every country must be a 
business institution, heavily capitalized, and conducted for 
profit. In England the decline of journalism as a profession 
and the rise of the " stunt " press has been noted and deplored 
by Englishmen. Years ago it meant something to be editor 
of the London Times, and the appointment of a new man to 
the position was an event not less important than a change in 
the cabinet. Who is editor of the Times now is a matter of no 
consequence except to the man who receives the salary check. 
English journalism is in almost as bad a case as American. In 
England, however, there is at least one exception which 
has no counterpart in America, the Manchester Guardian; 
this admirable newspaper has the good fortune to be owned 
by people who are so rich that they are not obliged, and so 
honest that they are not willing, to sell out. It is this fact 
which has afforded Mr. Scott, the editor-in-chief for nearly 
half a century, an opportunity adequate to his courage and 
ability. There are few such opportunities in England, and 
none in America. Even the Springfield Republican has largely 
lost its old character. 



JOURNALISM 39 

As for the continental papers, one who does not read any of 
them regularly is in no position to judge. In 1900 William 
James, a shrewd observer, wrote in a letter: " The Continental 
papers of course are ' nowhere.' As for our yellow papers — 
every country has its criminal classes, and with us and in 
France, they have simply got into journalism as part of their 
professional evolution, and they must be got out. Mr. Bosan- 
quet somewhere says that so far from the ' dark ages ' being 
over, we are just at the beginning of a new dark-age period. 
He means that ignorance and unculture, which then were 
merely brutal, are now articulate and possessed of a literary 
voice, and the fight is transferred from fields and castles and 
town walls to ' organs of publicity.' " This is only a passing 
remark in an informal letter. But it is a partial explanation 
of American yellow journalism which in twenty years has 
swamped the whole press, including papers that pretend to be 
respectable, and it suggests what the state of things was, and 
is, in France. I 

It should be noted, however, that personal journalism has 
not entirely disappeared in France, that the editor can still be 
brought to account, sometimes at the point of a pistol, for lies 
and slander, and that a young French litterateur, before he 
has won his spurs in poetry, drama, or fiction, can regard jour- 
nalism as an honourable occupation in which it is worth while 
to make a name. 

With the decadence in all countries, certainly in America, of 
the journalist as a professional man in an honourable craft, 
there might conceivably have been a gain in objectivity, in the 
right sort of impersonality. Anonymity might have ensured a 
dispassionate fidelity to facts. But there has been no such 
gain. Responsibility has been transferred from the journalist 
to his employers, and he is on his mettle to please his em- 
ployers, to cultivate whatever virtues are possible to journal- 
ism, accuracy, clearness of expression, zeal in searching out 
and interpreting facts, only in so far forth as his employers 
demand them, only as his livelihood and chances of promotion 
depend on them. The ordinary journalist, being an ordinary 
human being, must prefer to do honest work; for there is no 
pleasure in lying, though there is a temptation to fill space with 



40 CIVILIZATION 

unfounded or unverified statements. And if his manager or- 
ders him to find a story where there is no story, or to find a 
story of a certain kind where the facts lead to a story of an- 
other kind, he will not come back empty-handed lest he go 
away empty-handed on pay-day. Any one who has worked in 
a newspaper office knows that the older men are likely to be 
weary and cynical and that the younger men fall into two 
classes, those who are too stupid to be discontented with any 
aspect of their position except the size of their salaries, and 
those who hope either to rise to the better paid positions, or 
to " graduate," as they put it, from daily journalism to other 
kinds of literary work. 

The journalist, then, should be acquitted of most of the 
faults of journalism. Mr. Walter Lippmann says in his sane 
little book, "Liberty and the News": "Resistance to the 
inertias of the profession, heresy to the institution, and willing- 
ness to be fired rather than write what you do not believe, 
these wait on nothing but personal courage." That is a little 
like saying that the harlot can stop harlotry by refusing to ply 
her trade — which is indeed the attitude of some people in com- 
fortable circumstances. I doubt if Mr. Lippmann would have 
written just as he did if he had ever had to depend for his 
dinner on pleasing a managing editor, if he had not been from 
very early in his brilliant career editor of a liberal endowed 
journal in which he is free to express his beliefs. Most news- 
paper men are poor and not brilliant. The correspondents 
whom Mr. Lippmann mentions as " eminences on a rather 
flat plateau " are nearly all men who have succeeded in other 
work than newspaper correspondence, and if not a newspaper 
in the world would hire them, most of them could afford to 
thumb their noses at the Ochses, Reids, and Harmsworths. 
Personal courage is surely a personal matter, and it can seldom 
be effective in correcting the abuses of an institution, especially 
when the institution can hire plenty of men of adequate if not 
equal ability to take the place of the man of stubborn integrity. 
I know one journalist who lost his position as managing editor 
of two wealthy newspapers, one in Boston, the other in New 
York, in the first instance because he refused to print a false 
and cowardly retraction dictated by a stockholder whom the 



JOURNALISM 41 

editor-in-chief desired to serve, in the second instance because 
he refused to distort war news. But what good did his single- 
handed rebellion do, except to make a few friends proud of 
him? Did either newspaper lose even one mournful subscriber? 
Did the advertising department suffer? Far from it. Another 
man took his place, a man not necessarily less honest, but of 
more conformable temperament. The muddy waters of jour- 
nalism did not show a ripple. Paradoxically, the journalist is 
the one man who can do little or nothing to improve journalism. 
Mr. Lippmann's suggestion that our salvation lies " ultimately 
in the infusion of the news-structure by men with a new training 
and outlook," is, as he knows, the expression of a vague hope, 
too remotely ultimate to have practical bearing on the actual 
situation. The man of training and outlook, especially of out- 
look, is the unhappiest man in the employ of a newspaper. His 
salvation, if not ours, lies in getting out of newspaper work and 
applying his ability and vision in some occupation which does 
not discourage precisely the merits which an honest institu- 
tion should foster. This is not merely the opinion of a critical 
layman but represents accurately if not literally the advice 
given to me by a successful editor and writer of special ar- 
ticles. " In this game," he said, " you lose your soul." 
' The stories of individuals who have tried to be decent in 
newspaper work and have been fired might be valuable if they 
were collated and if the better journalists would unite to lay 
the foundation in fact of more such stories. But a profession, 
a trade, which has so little sense of its own interest that it 
does not even make an effective union (to be sure, the organi- 
zation of newspaper writers met with some success, especially 
in Boston, but to-day the organization has practically disap- 
peared) to keep its wages up can never be expected to unite 
in the impersonal interests of truth and intellectual dignity. 
The individual who charges against an enormous unshakable 
institution with the weapons of his personal experience is too 
easily disposed of as a sore-head and is likely to be laughed 
at even by his fellow-journalists who know that in the main 
he is right. 

This has happened to Mr. Upton Sinclair. I have studied 
" The Brass Check " carefully for the selfish purpose of getting 



42 CIVILIZATION 

enough material so that the writing of this chapter should be 
nothing but a lazy man's task of transcription, not to speak of 
the noble ethical purpose of reforming the newspaper by ex- 
posing its iniquities. I confess I am disappointed. " The 
Brass Check" is a mixture of autobiography, valuable in its way 
to those who admire Mr. Sinclair, as I do most sincerely, and 
of evidence which, though properly personal, ought to be 
handled in an objective manner. I am puzzled that a man of 
" training and outlook," who has shown in at least one of his 
novels an excellent sense of construction, could throw together 
such a hodge-podge of valid testimony, utterly damning to 
his opponents, and naive trivialities, assertions insecurely 
founded and not important if they were well founded. I am 
so sure that Mr. Sinclair is on the whole right that I am re- 
luctant to criticize him adversely, to lend a shadow of encour- 
agement to the real adversary, who is unscrupulous and se- 
curely entrenched. But as a journalist of " training and out- 
look " I lament that another journalist of vastly more ability, 
experience, and information should not have done better work 
in selecting and constructing his material. As a lawyer said to 
his client, " You are a saint and you are right, but a court- 
room is no place for a saint and you are a damn bad witness." 
Mr. Sinclair's evidence, however, is all there to be dug out 
by whoever has the will and the patience. If one-tenth of it 
is valid and nine-tenths of doubtful value, the one-tenth is 
sufficient to show the sinister forces behind the newspapers and 
to explain some of the reasons why the newspapers are untrust- 
worthy, cowardly, and dishonest. 

Though Mr. Sinclair tells some damaging stories about the 
sins of anonymous reporters and of the prostitution of writers 
like the late Elbert Hubbard, who had no excuse for being 
anything but honest and independent, yet Mr. Sinclair on the 
whole would agree with me that the chief responsibility for 
the evils of journalism does not rest upon the journalist. He 
tries to place it squarely where it belongs on the owners of 
the press and the owners of the owners. But it is difficult to 
determine how the weight of guilt is distributed, for the press 
is a monster with more than two legs. 

Part of the responsibility rests upon the reader, if indeed 



JOURNALISM 43 

the reader is to blame for being a gullible fool and for buying 
shoddy goods. Mr. Lippmann says: " There is everywhere an 
increasingly angry disillusionment about the press, a growing 
sense of being baffled and misled." And Mr. Sinclair says: 
" The people want the news; the people clamour for the news." 
Both these statements may be true. But where do the learned 
doctors find the symptoms? A few of us who have some 
special interest in the press, in publicity, in political problems, 
are disillusioned and resentful. Probably everybody has said 
or heard somebody else say: '' That's only a newspaper story," 
or " You cannot believe everything you read." But such mild 
scepticism shows no promise of swelling to an angry demand on 
the part of that vague aggregate, the People, for better, more 
honest newspapers, to such an angry demand as you can ac- 
tually hear in any house you enter for cheaper clothes and 
lower taxes. 

If we make a rough calculation of the number of papers sold 
and of the number of people in the main economic classes, it is 
evident that papers of large circulation must go by the million 
to the working-people. Well, is there any sign of growing 
wrath in the breasts of the honest toilers against the news- 
papers, against Mr. Hearst's papers, which throw them sops 
of hypocritical sympathy, not to speak of papers which are 
openly unfair in handling labour news? Or consider the more 
prosperous classes. In the smoking-car of any suburban train 
bound for New York some morning after eight o'clock, look at 
the men about you, business men, the kind that work, or do 
something, in offices. They are reading the Times and the 
Tribune. There may be some growls about something in the 
day's news, something that has happened on the stock-market, 
or a stupid throw to third base in yesterday's game. But is 
there any murmur of discontent with the newspaper itself? I 
fail to find any evidence of widespread disgust with the news- 
paper as it is and a concomitant hunger for something bet- 
ter. The Reader, the Public is mute, if not inglorious, and 
accepts uncritically what the daily press provides. The reader 
has not much opportunity to choose the better from the worse. 
If he gives up one paper he must take another that is just as 
bad. He is between the devil and the deep sea, as when he 



44 CIVILIZATION 

casts his ballot for Democrat or Republican. And if he votes 
Socialist he gets the admirable New York Call, which is less a 
newspaper than a vehicle of propaganda. When one paper is 
slightly more honest and intelligent than its rivals, the differ- 
ence is so slight that only those especially interested in the 
problems of the press are aware of it. For example, in dis- 
cussing these problems with newspaper men, with critical read- 
ers of the press, persons for any reason intelligently interested 
in the problems, I have never found one who did not have 
a good word to say for the New York Globe. It is so appre- 
ciably more decent than the other New York papers that I can 
almost forgive it for thrusting Dr. Frank Crane under my 
nose when I am looking at the amusing pictures of Mr. Fon- 
taine Fox — the newspaper vaudeville has to supply stunts for 
all juvenile tastes. Yet the Globe does not find a clamorous 
multitude willing to reward it for its superiority to its neigh- 
bours, which I grant is too slight for duffers to discern. The 
American reader of newspapers, that is, almost everybody, is 
a duffer, so far as the newspaper is concerned, uncritical^ docile, 
only meekly incredulous. It may be that " the people " get as 
good newspapers as they wish and deserve^ just as they are said 
to get as good government as they wish and deserve. Cer- 
tainly if the readers of newspapers seem to demand nothing 
better, the manufacturers of newspapers have no inducement to 
give them anything better. But this does not get us any 
nearer a solution of the problem or do more than indicate that 
some vaguely indeterminate part of the responsibility for the 
evils of the newspapers must rest on the people who buy them. 
From the buyer to the seller is the shortest step. The news- 
paper is a manufacturing concern producing goods to sell at a 
profit; it is also a department store, and it has some charac- 
teristics that suggest the variety show and the brothel. But 
the newspaper^differs from all other commodities in that it does 
not live by what it receives from the consumer who buys it. 
Three cents multiplied a million times does not support a news- 
paper. The valuable part of a newspaper from the manufac- 
turer's point of view, and also to a great extent from the 
reader's point of view, is the advertisements. The columns of 



JOURNALISM 45 

" reading matter," so called, are little more than bait to at- 
tract enough readers to make the paper worth while as a vehicle 
for advertisements. It is of no importance to the management 
whether a given column contain news from Washington or 
Moscow, true or false, or a scandal or a funny story, as long 
as it leads some thousands of human eyes to look at it and so 
to look at adjacent columns in which are set forth the merits 
of a safety razor or an automobile tire or a fifty-dollar suit 
of clothes at thirty-nine dollars and a half. There has to be 
a good variety and a certain balance of interest in the columns 
of reading matter to secure the attention of all kinds of people. 
This accounts for two things, the great development in the 
newspaper of pure, or impure, entertainment, of more or less 
clever features, at the expense of space that might be devoted 
to news, and also the tendency to accentuate narrative interest 
above all other kinds of interest. A reporter is never sent out 
by his chief to get information, but always, in the lingo of the 
office, to get a " story." This is sound psychology. Every- 
body likes a story, and there are only a few souls in the world 
who yearn at breakfast for information. To attack the news- 
paper for being sensational is to forget that all the great stories 
of the world, from the amatory exploits of Helen of Troy and 
Cleopatra to the scandalous adventures of Mrs. Black, the 
banker's wife, are sensational and should be so treated. The 
newspaper manager is indifferent to every quality in his news 
columns except their power to attract the reader and so secure 
circulation and so please the advertiser. And the advertiser 
has as his primary interest only that of bringing to the atten- 
tion of a certain number of people the virtues of his suspenders, 
shoes, and soothing syrup. 

But the advertiser has a secondary interest. The newspaper 
willy-nilly deals with ideas, such as they are. No idea inimical 
to the advertiser's business or in general to the business system 
of which he is a dependent part must be allowed in the paper. 
Therefore all newspapers are controlled by the advertising de- 
partment, that is, the counting-room. They are controlled 
negatively and positively. We are discussing general charac- 
teristics and have not space for detailed evidence. But one 
or two cases will suffice. 



46 CIVILIZATION 

An example of the coercion of the newspaper by the adver- 
tiser was recently afforded by the Philadelphia press. The 
Gimbel Brothers, owners of a department store, were charged 
by United States Government officials with profiteering. The 
only Philadelphia paper that made anything of the story was 
the Press, which was owned by Mr. Wanamaker of the rival de- 
partment store. The other papers ignored the story or put it in 
one edition and then withdrew it. If there is an elevator acci- 
dent in a general office building, it is reported. If there is a 
similar accident in a department store, it is usually not re- 
ported. When the New York Times (April 25^ 192 1) prints 
a short account of the experience of four Wellesley college stu- 
dents who disguised their intellectual superiority and got jobs 
in department stores, the head-line tells us that they " Find 
They Can Live on Earnings," though the matter under the 
head-line does not bear this out. Perhaps it does no harm to 
suppress, or fail to publish, news of accidents and to make 
out a good case for the living and working conditions of shop- 
girls. These are minor matters in the news of the world and 
their importance would appear only if they were accumulated 
in their tediously voluminous mass. 

The positive corruption of the newspaper by the advertiser 
goes deeper and proceeds from larger economic powers than 
individual merchants. There is all over the world a terrific 
economic contest between the employing classes and the wage- 
earning classes. The dramatic manifestation of this contest is 
the strike. Almost invariably the news of a strike is, if not 
falsified, so shaped as to be unfavourable to the workers. In 
the New York Nation of January 5, 192 1, Mr. Charles G. 
Miller, formerly editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, exposes 
the lies of the Pittsburgh papers during the steel strike. In 
two weeks the Pittsburgh papers published more than thirty 
pages of paid advertisements denouncing the leadership of the 
strike and invoking " Americanism " against radicalism and 
syndicalism. The news and editorial attitude of the papers 
coincided with the advertisements and gave the impression that 
the strikers were disloyal, un-American, bolshevik. They were 
silent on the real questions at issue, hours, pay, working con- 
ditions. And not only the Pittsburgh press but the press of 



JOURNALISM 47 

the entire country was ooisoned. For the Associated Press 
and other news services are not independent organizations 
feeding news to their clients but simply interrelated news- 
papers swapping each otier's lies. The Denver newspapers 
control all the news that is read in Boston about the Colorado 
coal mines. The Boston newspapers control all the news that 
is read in San Francisco about the New England textile mills. 
The head of a local bureau of the Associated Press is not a 
reporter; he is merely a more or less skilful compiler and 
extracter who sends to the nation, to the whole world, matter 
which is furnished him by the papers of his district. So that 
he can usually hold up his hand and swear to the honesty of 
his service; he is like an express agent who ships a case of 
what he thinks is canned corn, and it is not his fault if there 
is opium concealed in the case. 

The power of the advertiser to make the newspaper servile 
and right in its opinions is not confined to the local depart- 
ment store or the special industry operating through a district 
press. Nor is it confined to the negative punishment of with- 
drawing advertising of commodities like hosiery, chewing gum, 
and banking service from papers that offend their masters. 
There is another method of exerting this power, and that is 
to buy advertising space in which to set forth ideas calculated 
to influence public opinion. Here is a full page from a New 
York paper containing a cartoon and text, the main idea of 
which is that Labour and Capital should pull together. It is 
signed by " 'America First ' Publicity Association " and is 
Bulletin No. 115 in a series — "be sure to read them all." 
This full-page bulletin, of which there have already been 
more than a hundred, appeared in many newspapers — I do 
not know how many; and a full page costs a good deal of 
money. What is the object of this patriotic association? The 
prevailing theme of the bulletins which I have seen is " Labour 
be good! Fight Bolshevism! Beware the Agitator! " Who is 
going to be influenced by these bulletins? Not the working- 
man. He knows what he wants, and if he is the dupe of agi- 
tators and false theories, these sermons can never rescue him. 
Not the capitalist. He knows what he wants, and gets it. 
Perhaps the little middle-class fellow may swallow such bun- 



48 CIVILIZATIOJT 

combe on his daily journey between his office and his home in 
the suburbs. But he is already an ir tellectually depraved ser- 
vant of the employing classes, and it is not worth hundreds 
of thousands of dollars to complete aid confirm his corruption. 
The primary object of the advertisement is to keep the news- 
paper " good," to encourage its editorial departments, through 
the advertising department, not to fall below 99 and 44/100% 
pure Americanism or admit ideas inimical to the general in- 
terests of chambers of commerce, manufacturers' associations, 
and other custodians of the commonweal. I suspect that 
some clever advertising man has stung the gentlemen who 
supply the money for this campaign of education, but what is 
a few million to them? The man who can best afford to laugh 
is the business manager of the newspaper when he looks at the 
check and meditates on the easy money of some of his adver- 
tising clients and the easy credulity of some of his reading 
clients. 

It may be argued that the newspaper, which is a business, 
ought to be controlled, directly and indirectly, by business in- 
terests; and certainly if we allow the commercial powers to 
manage our food supply, transportation, and housing, it is a 
relatively minor matter if the same powers dominate our press. 
In like manner if we tolerate dishonest governments, we are 
only dealing with an epiphenomenon when we consider the 
dishonest and inefficient treatment by the press of public af- 
fairs, national and international. All the news of politics, di- 
plomacy, war, world-trade emanates from government officials 
or from those who are interested in turning to their own ad- 
vantage the actions of officials. Business is behind govern- 
ment, and government is behind business; which comes first 
is unimportant like the problem of the chicken and the egg. 
It is a partnership of swindle, and though the details of the 
relation are infinitely complicated, the relation in itself is 
easy to understand and accounts quite simply for the fact that 
world news is the most viciously polluted of all the many 
kinds of news. The efforts of a merchant to keep up the good 
name of his department store, or of a group of manufacturers 
to break a strike are feeble and even reasonable, so far as 
they use the newspapers, compared to the audacious perver- 



JOURNALISM 49 

sion of truth by the combination of arch criminals, govern- 
ment and international business. 

The star example in modern times is the current newspaper 
history of Russia. The New York Nation of March 6, 1920, 
published an article showing that in the columns of the New 
York Times Lenin had died once, been almost killed three 
times, and had fallen and fled innumerable times. The New 
Republic published August 4, 1920, a supplement by Lippmann 
and Merz summarizing the news which the Times printed 
about Russia during the three years preceding March 1920. 
The analysis shows an almost unbroken daily misrepresenta- 
tion of the programme, purposes and strength of the Russian 
government and continuous false " optimism," as the writers 
gently call it, about the military exploits of Russia's enemies, 
the " white hopes," Kolchak and Denekin. The writers ex- 
pressly state that they did not select the Times because it is 
worse than other papers but, on the contrary, because it " is 
one of the really great newspapers of the world." " Rich " or 
" powerful " would have been a better word than " great." 
The sources of error in the Times were the Associated Press, 
the special correspondents of the Times, government officials 
and political factions hostile to the present Russian regime. 
Among the offenders was the United States Government or 
the journalistic fake-factory in or adjacent to the Department 
of State. At this writing the article in the New Republic has 
been out nearly a year, that in the Nation more than a year. 
It is fair to assume that they have been seen by the managers 
of the Times and other powerful journalists, that if there was 
any misstatement the weekly journals would have been forced 
to recant, which they have not done, and that if the Ochses 
of the newspaper world had any conscience they would have 
been at least more careful after such devastating exposures. 
But the game of " Lying about Lenin " goes merrily on. 

The American government and the American press have not 
been more mendacious in their treatment of Russia than the 
governments and the press of other nations, but they have 
been more persistently stupid and unteachable in the face of 
facts. The British government has been engaged in an agile 
zigzag retreat from its first position of no intercourse with 



so CIVILIZATION 

Russia, and when the London Labour Herald exposed the trick 
of Lloyd George which consisted of printing and sending out 
jrom Russia propaganda against the Soviet government, the 
prince of political liars was obliged to stop that fraud. On 
the other hand one of the first acts of our new administration 
was Mr. Hughes's idiotic confirmation of the attitude held by 
the old administration, and he furnished the newspapers real 
news, since the Secretary's opinions, however stupid, are real 
news, to add to their previous accumulation of ignorance and 
lies, and thereby encouraged them in their evil ways. If a 
government is composed of noodles and rogues, the press 
which reports the activities of the government and the opinions 
of its officials is only secondarily responsible for deceiving the 
public. The editors might be more critical in sifting the true 
from the false. But the newspaper has no motive for trying 
to correct the inherent vices of business and government; it 
does not originate those vices but merely concurs in them and 
reflects them. The newspaper is primarily responsible only 
for the stupidity and mendacity of its correspondents and 
editors. It is not an independent institution with its own ethic, 
with either will or full opportunity to serve the truth, but is 
only the symptom and expression of the vast corruption that 
lies behind it and of the dense popular ignorance that stands 
gaping before it. 

The Dunciad of the Press does not end in quite universal 
darkness. There is a little light over the horizon. A new 
organization called The Federated Press, which endeavours to 
" get the news in spite of the newspapers and the great news 
agencies," announces that already two hundred editors all over 
the world are using its service. It is too soon to tell how suc- 
cessful this enterprise will be, but it is a ray of promise, be- 
cause it is an association of working journalists and not a 
vague aspiration of reformers and uplifters. Until some such 
organization does become powerful and by practical labour 
make an impression on the daily paper, we shall have to de- 
pend for enlightenment on a few weekly and monthly period- 
icals of relatively small circulation. Most of the popular 
weeklies and monthlies are as bad in their way as the news- 
papers, but they aim chiefly at entertainment; their treatment 



JOURNALISM 51 

of the news in special articles and editorials is a subordinate 
matter, and their chief sin is not dishonesty but banality. The 
periodicals which do handle the news, always honestly, usually 
with intelligence, the Nation, the New Republic, the Freeman 
and one or two others, must have an influence greater than 
can be measured by their circulation; for though the giant 
press laughs at the cranky little Davids with their vicious 
radical ideas, and though it is too strong to be slain or even 
severely wounded, yet it cannot be quite insensible to the 
stones that fly from those valorous slings. It is, however, 
an indication of the low mental level of America that the com- 
bined circulation of these journals, which are, moreover, 
largely subscribed for by the same readers, is less than that of 
a newspaper in a second-rate city. Two of them are endowed 
or subsidized by liberal men of means and none of them is 
shiningly prosperous. An intelligent populace would buy them 
by the million. So we leave the responsibility where, after 
all, it belongs. The American press is an accurate gauge of 
the American mind. 

John Macy 



THE LAW 

THE first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." This 
outcry of Jack Cade's followers that the disappearance 
of the whole profession was the initial step in man's progress 
toward a better world would be echoed in the United States 
by the revolutionists of to-day, and also by not a few solid 
business men who have nothing else in common with the me- 
diaeval agitator except perhaps the desire to see the fountains 
run wine and make it a felony to drink near-beer. Indeed 
almost every one takes his fling at the law. Doctors and min- 
isters can be avoided if we dislike them, but the judge has a 
sure grip upon us all. He drags us before him against our 
will; no power in the land can overturn his decision, but de- 
feated litigants, disappointed sociologists, and unsuccessful 
primary candidates all join in a prolonged yell, " Kill the um- 
pire." 

Where there is smoke, there is fire. Underneath all this 
agitation is a deep-seated suspicion and dissatisfaction aroused 
by the legal profession and the whole machinery of justice. 
It exists despite the fact observed by Bryce, that our system 
of written constitutions has created a strongly marked legal 
spirit in the people and accustomed them to look at all ques- 
tions in a legal way — a characteristic exemplified when other 
peoples judged the Covenant of the League of Nations as an 
expression of broad policies and the aspirations of a hundred 
years, while we went at it word by word with a dissecting 
knife and a microscope as if it had been a millionaire's will 
or an Income Tax Act. Moreover, although lawyers as a class 
are unpopular, they are elected to half the seats in the legis- 
latures and in Congress. The profession which cannot boast 
a single English Prime Minister in the century between Per- 
ceval and Asquith, has trained every President who was not 
a general; except Harding. Perhaps this very fact that lawyers 

S3 



54 CIVILIZATION 

receive public positions out of all proportion to their numbers 
partially accounts for the prejudice felt against them by men 
in other professions and occupations. 

Hostility to lawyers and case-law is no new phenomenon in 
this country. Puritans and Quakers arrived with unpleasant 
memories of the English bench and bar, who had harried them 
out of their homes. To them, law meant heresy trials, 
and the impression that these left on the minds of their victims 
has been set down forever by Bunyan in the prosecution of 
Faithful at Vanity Fair. The Colonists were no more anxious 
to transplant some Lord Hate-good, his counsellors, and his 
law books to our shores, than Eugene V. Debs would strive 
to set up injunctions and sedition statutes if he were founding 
a socialistic commonwealth in the South Seas. The popular 
attitude toward lawyers was re-in forced by the clergy who 
were naturally reluctant to have their great moral and intel- 
lectual influence disputed by men who would hire themselves 
out to argue either side of any question. The ministers who 
ruled Massachusetts and Connecticut by the Law of Moses, 
wanted no rivals to challenge their decisions upon the author- 
ity of Bracton and Coke. And everywhere, except perhaps 
on the Southern plantations, the complicated structure of 
feudal doctrines, which constituted such a large part of Eng- 
lish law well into the i8th century, was as unsuited to Colonial 
ways and needs as a Gothic cathedral in the wilderness. Life 
was so pressing, time was so short, labour so scarce, that the 
only law which could receive acceptance must be so simple 
that the settlers could apply it themselves. Although Justice 
Story has spread wide the belief that our ancestors brought 
the Common Law to New England on the Mayflower, the 
truth is that only a few fragments got across. These were 
rapidly supplemented by rules based on pioneer conditions. 
Much the same phenomenon occurred as in the California of 
1849, where the miners ignored the water-law of the Atlantic 
seaboard which gave each person bordering on a stream some 
share of the water, and adopted instead the custom better 
suited to a new country of first come, first served. Almost 
the earliest task of the founders of a Colony was the regula- 
tion of the disputes which arise in a primitive civilization by a 



THE LAW 55 

brief legislative code concerning crimes, torts, and the simplest 
contracts, in many ways like the dooms of the Anglo-Saxon 
kings. Gaps in these codes were not filled from the Common 
Law, as would be the case to-day, but by the discretion of the 
magistrate, or in some Colonies, in the early days, from the 
Bible. Land laws and conveyances were simple, — the under- 
lying English principle of primogeniture was abolished out- 
right by several Colonial charters, and disputes of title were 
lessened by the admirable system of registering deeds. Such 
law did not require lawyers, and it is not surprising that even 
the magistrates were usually laymen. The chief justice of 
Rhode Island as late as 1818 was a blacksmith. Oftentimes 
a controversy was taken away from the court by the legisla- 
ture and settled by a special statute. Thus, instead of the 
English and modern American judge-made law, the Colonists 
received for the most part executive and legislative justice, and 
lived under a protoplasmic popular law, with the Common Law 
only one of its many ingredients. 

The training of the few Colonists who did become lawyers 
may be judged from that of an early attorney general of Rhode 
Island: 

" When he made up his mind to study law, he went into the 
garden to exercise his talents in addressing the court and jury. 
He then selected five cabbages in one row for judges, and 
twelve in another row for jurors. After trying his hand there 
a while, he went boldly into court and took upon himself the 
duties of an advocate, and a little observation and experience 
there convinced him that the same cabbages were in the court 
house which he thought he had left in the garden, — five in one 
row and twelve in another." 

The natural alienation of such attorneys from the intricacies 
of English law was increased by occasional conflicts between 
that system and Colonial statutes or conceptions of justice. An 
excellent Connecticut act for the disposal of a decedent's land 
was declared void by the Privy Council in London as contrary 
to the laws of England, and the attempt of the New York 
governor and judges to enforce the obnoxious English law of 
libel in the prosecution of Peter Zenger in order to throttle 
the criticism of public officials by the press, would have sue- 



S6 CIVILIZATION 

ceeded if the jury had not deliberately rejected the legal defi- 
nitions given by the court. 

The Common Law became somewhat more popular when the 
principles of individual rights which had blocked Stuart op- 
pression were used against George III. After the Revolution, 
however, it suffered with all things English. Many lawyers 
had been Loyalists. The commercial depression turned the 
bar into debt collectors. The great decisions of Lord Mans- 
field which laid the foundations of modern business law were 
rejected by Jefferson and many other Americans because of 
that judge's reactionary policy towards the Colonies. Many 
States actually passed legislation forbidding the use of English 
cases as authorities in our courts. The enforcement of the 
Common Law of sedition and criminal libel by judges, many 
of whom had been educated in England, identified the Com- 
mon Law with the suppression of freedom of speech. Never- 
theless, the old simple Colonial rules were insufficient to decide 
the complex commercial questions which were constantly aris- 
ing, especially in maritime transactions. Aid had to be ob- 
tained from some mature system of law. 

At this moment a rival to the Common Law presented itself 
in the Napoleonic code of 1804, attractive to the populace 
just because it was French, and to many of the bar because of 
its logical arrangement and because unlike English lawyers 
they were widely read in Roman and modern Continental law. 
For a time it was actually doubtful whether the legal assistance 
which American judges needed would be drawn from England 
or France. French writers were cited in the courts and Liv- 
ingston drafted a code on the Napoleonic model for Louisiana. 
The English law had, however, one great advantage. It was 
written in our own language. Furthermore, a group of excep- 
tionally able judges such as Joseph Story and James Kent, by 
their decisions and writings, virtually imported the great bulk 
of the Common Law into this country and reworked it to meet 
American conditions. Nevertheless, this law was something 
that came from outside and had not grown up altogether from 
the lives and thoughts of our own people, so that it has never 
meant to Americans what English law means to Englishmen, 



THE LAW 57 

for whom it is as much a product of their own land as par- 
liamentary government or the plays of Shakespeare. 

Another reason for American hostility to law was found at 
the frontier. The pioneer, imbued with the conviction that he 
was entitled to the land which he had cleared, ploughed and 
sown^ often thrown by crop failures into debt to the tradesmen 
in the town, resented law as something which was forced upon 
him by people who led easy lives, who took his land away 
for some technical defect of title, foreclosed mortgages, com- 
pelled him to pay for goods of high prices and low quality, 
suppressed hereditary feuds, and substituted a mass of book 
learning which he was too ignorant or too busy to read, for 
the simple principles of fair play which seemed sufficient to 
him. Habitual obedience to law was a spirit which could not 
develop in men who were largely squatters, and who, from 
the outset of our national history, disregarded the Congres- 
sional statutes which required that public lands must be sur- 
veyed before they were settled. Sometimes, as in this instance, 
the settler's resistance to law was successful. More often they 
were overpowered by the strength of civilization and submitted 
to the law sullen and unconvinced. 

The old frontier is gone, a new frontier has arisen. The 
meeting place of unfriendly races has moved Eastward from 
the Missouri to the Merrimac. The pioneers of to-day came 
often from autocratic lands where law was something imposed 
on them from above, and they were slow to regard our law 
as different in kind. It was not a part of themselves. More- 
over, they did not find in America the energetic police organi- 
zation which had compelled their obedience in Europe. The 
men who framed our system of laws were taught by Puri- 
tanism that duties declared by those lawfully in authority 
should be voluntarily performed. A statute once on the books 
got much vitality from this spirit and from the social pressure 
of the homogeneous settled communities, whatever the difficul- 
ties of enforcement at the frontier. These forces behind law 
became weaker when the population was split into numerous 
and diverse races by the great tide of immigration. Obedience 
to law, never automatic among us, now became liable to cease 



S8 CIVILIZATION 

altogether whenever a person thought the law unreasonable or 
felt fairly certain that he would not be found out. 

This belief that a law ceases to have obligation when it be- 
comes inexpedient to obey it; extends far beyond the recently 
arrived elements in our population. For instance, a wealthy 
man with several American generations behind him, who was 
serving on the jury in an accident case, stood up on a chair 
as soon as the jury got into the consultation-room and urged 
them to disregard everything which the judge had instructed 
them about the inability of the plaintiff to recover if he, as 
well as the defendant, was negligent. " This doctrine of con- 
tributory negligence," said this educated juryman, " is not the 
law of France or Germany or any country on the Continent of 
Europe. A number of eminent writers agree that it is a thor- 
oughly bad law. Let's have nothing to do with it." Needless 
to say, the plaintiff recovered. This conception of a higher 
law than that on the books may owe something to the Aboli- 
tionists' belief that they were not bound by the laws protect- 
ing the inhuman institution of slavery. Many conscientious 
persons still hold that a man ought not to be punished for dis- 
obeying a law which he believes to be morally wrong. For- 
tunately, a corrective to this dangerous doctrine of the inner 
legal light is found in the words of a leading Abolitionist, Judge 
Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, in charging the Grand Jury on 
riotous resistance to the fugitive slave law, although he him- 
self regarded it as vicious legislation: 

" A man whose private conscience leads him to disobey a 
law recognized by the community must take the consequences 
of that disobedience. It is a matter solely between him and 
his Maker. He should take good care that he is not mis- 
taken, that his private opinion does not result from passion or 
prejudice, but, if he believes it to be his duty to disobey, he 
must be prepared to abide by the result; and the laws as they 
are enacted and settled by the constituted authorities to be 
constitutional and valid, must be enforced, although it may be 
to his grievous harm. It will not do for the public authori- 
ties to recognize his private opinion as a justification of his 
acts." 

Disrespect for law has been aggravated by the changing 



THE LAW 59 

function of the lawyer since the Civil War. In the forties and 
fifties^ he stood out as a leader in his community, lifted by 
education above the mass of citizens, often before the public 
gaze in the court-room and chosen because of his forensic elo- 
quence to deliver many of those set orations which Americans 
constantly demand, brought forward by the litigation of those 
days as the avenger of crime, the defender of those unjustly 
imprisoned, the liberator of the escaping slave, or upholding 
some great public right on behalf of his city or State — the 
construction of a toll-free bridge across the Charles, the main- 
tenance of the charter of Dartmouth College. After 1870, 
this pre-eminence was challenged by the new captains of in- 
dustry, and their appearance was accompanied by an altera- 
tion in the work of many an able lawyer, which soon obscured 
him to the popular imagination. The formation of large busi- 
nesses required more and more the skill which he possessed. 
Rewards for drafting and consultation became greater than 
for litigation, which was growing tedious and costly, so that 
his clients avoided it whenever possible. Consequently, he 
changed from an advocate into a " client care-taker," seldom 
visible to the people and often associated in their minds with 
the powerful and detested corporations which he represented. 
Much of the prejudice against " corporation lawyers " was un- 
just, and the business development of to-day would have been 
impossible without the skill in organization and reorganization 
of great enterprises which they displayed during the last half 
century. However, popular opinion of a class is inevitably 
based, not on all its members, but on a conspicuous few, and 
the kind of legal career described in Winston Churchill's " Far 
Country" was common enough to furnish data for damaging 
generalizations. In any case, the decline in the public in- 
fluence of the bar was inevitable, especially as certain busi- 
nesses retained the exclusive legal services of a staff of men, 
so that it could be said: " Lawyers used to have clients; now, 
clients have lawyers." 

Of course, during this period there were many lawyers who 
made a notable success by conducting cases against corpora- 
tions. These accident lawyers were, however, no more popu- 
lar than their opponents, even with the workingmen whom 



6o CIVILIZATION 

they represented. The small means of their clients made any 
remuneration from them improbable unless damages were re- 
covered. Consequently, the lawyer agreed to take nothing if 
defeated, but to even matters up insisted on a large fraction 
of the amount awarded, usually one-third or even more, if he 
won. Therefore, he fought not merely for justice and his 
client, but for his own fee, and the temptation to win by 
every possible means was great. Business men were quick to 
label him unscrupulous, while working-men resented it when 
a large slice of the money which the jury gave to them as a 
just measure for suffering a lifelong disability vanished into 
some lawyer's pockets. 

No satisfactory substitute for the contingent fee was sug- 
gested, but the prejudice created by the system and by the dis- 
like of corporation lawyers was too great to be dispelled by 
the many members of the bar whose practice lay in neither 
of these two fields. And indeed, the profession as a whole 
cannot free itself from blame for some very definite evils, soon 
to be discussed. Unfortunately, the long-standing antagonism 
between lawyers and laymen has distracted the thoughts of 
both sides from wrongs which ought to be and can be cured, 
and turned them to never-ending disputes on problems of rela- 
tively small importance. For instance, almost any layman 
will open a discussion of the function of the lawyer by con- 
demning the profession because it defends criminals who are 
known to be guilty. The solution of this problem is not easy, 
but it is not worth a hundredth of the attention it receives, for 
it hardly ever arises. The criminal law is a small part of the 
whole law, and lawyers who have spent their whole lives in that 
field have declared that they were not certain of the guilt of 
a single client. A far more important problem is whether a 
lawyer should advocate the passage of legislation which he 
personally considers vicious. Indeed, the underlying ques- 
tion, to which lawyers and laymen ought to be devoting them- 
selves, is this. How far can the State ascertain the proper 
course of action by Hmiting itself to hearing paid representa- 
tives of the persons directly interested, financially or other- 
wise; or should the State also call in and pay trained men to 
investigate the question independently? The solution of this 



THE LAW 6i 

question will affect not only lawyers, but other professions as 
well. Medical experts, for instance, might cease to be hired 
by millionaires to prove them insane, or by the prosecuting 
attorney with the opposite purpose, but might be employed by 
the court to make an impartial inquiry into the mental condi- 
tion of a prisoner. In short, it may be that we have carried 
the notion of litigation as a contest of wits between two sides 
so far that the interests of society have not been adequately 
safeguarded. 

If laymen have erred in concentrating on minor points, 
lawyers have been far too ready to deny laymen any right to 
discuss law at all. It is just as if school-teachers should 
maintain that parents and citizens in general have no concern 
in the problems of education. The time has come to close 
the gulf in American life between the legal profession and the 
people who are ruled by laws. Law is the surface of contact 
where the pressure of society bears upon the individual. 
Doubtless, he attributes to the law many of the features in 
this pressure to which he objects, whereas they actually result 
from the social structure itself. The man who feels wronged 
by a prosecution for bigamy, or for stealing bread when he is 
starving for lack of employment, cannot expect to change the 
law without also changing the views of the community on 
monogamous marriage and the organization of industry. 
These institutions of society show themselves in the law just 
as the veins in a block of marble show themselves at the 
surface, but it is as futile for him to blame the law for " capital- 
ism," private property, or our present semi-permanent mar- 
riages as to try to get rid of the veins by scraping the surface of 
the marble. On the other hand, there are aspects of law which 
do not correspond to any existing social requirements or de- 
mands, and the layman has good cause to offer his opinion. 
And it may be worth listening to. The onlooker often sees most 
of the game. Although the la5mian may lack technical knowl- 
edge, he can appreciate the relation of law to his own de- 
partment of human activity — business, social service, health — 
in ways that are difficult for the lawyer who is absorbed in the 
pressing tasks of each day. Moreover, the lawyer's habitual 
and necessary obligation to conform to existing laws naturally 



62 CIVILIZATION 

inclines him to overlook their defects, which are obvious to 
those who can spend in detached criticism the same time which 
he requires for practical application. Modern medicine was 
created by Pasteur, who was not a doctor; modern English 
law by Bentham, who was a lawyer to the extent of arguing 
one case and who was edited by Mill, a philosopher and 
economist. 

Knowledge is no longer a matter of water-tight compart- 
ments. " All good work is one," says Wells in " Joan and 
Peter." Law touches psychology in its treatment of the de- 
fective and insane, medicine and surgery in industrial acci- 
dents and disease, political science in municipal corporations, 
economics in taxation, philosophy in its selection of the pur- 
poses it should strive to accomplish. And this is a meagre list. 
The greatest need of American law is the establishment of 
means for intelligent mutual understanding and effective co-op- 
eration, not merely between lawyers and experts in such other 
fields as those mentioned, but between lawyers and the mass of 
our population, who fill the jails, pay the taxes, drink city 
water, get hurt in factories, buy, sell, invest, build homes, and 
leave it all to their children when they die. 

For these men and women have a right to complain of our 
law. Its evils are not those commonly decried, lawyers to de- 
fend the guilty, reliance on precedents instead of common 
sense, bribed judges. The real defect is failure to keep up to 
date. Many existing legal rules have the same fault as New 
York surface-cars before the subway or Hoboken Ferries 
before the tubes. They were good in their day, but it has 
gone by and they cannot handle the traffic. The system 
formulated by Story and Kent worked well for the farms, 
small factories, and small banks of their time, but the great 
development of national resources and crowded cities pre- 
sented new situations unsuited to the old legal rules, and kept 
men too busy for the constructive leisure necessary for think- 
ing out a new system. The law became a hand-to-mouth 
affair, deciding each isolated problem as it arose, and often 
deciding it wrong. Yet lawyers were satisfied with law, just 
as business men with business. Then came the agitation of 
the last fifteen years, which has at least made us discontented 



THE LAW 63 

about many things. The next task is to stop calling each other 
names, sit down together, think matters through to a finish, 
and work together to complete the process which is farther 
along than we realize, of making over the common law system 
of an agricultural population a century ago to meet the needs 
of the city-dwelling America of to-day. 

A first step toward co-operation would be more discussion 
of law in the press. Several years ago Charles E. Hughes in 
a public address said that one reason why courts and lawyers 
were so unpopular in this country was the unfamiliarity of the 
people with what they were doing. Outside of criminal prose- 
cutions, divorces, and large constitutional cases, newspapers 
give very little attention to legal questions, and even these 
cases are presented fragmentarily with almost no attempt to 
present their historical background and the general principles 
at issue. There is nothing to compare with the resume of 
trials and decisions which appears from day to day in the Lon- 
don Times, no popular exposition of legal problems such as 
Woods Hutchinson has done for medicine or numerous writers 
for the achievements of Einstein. Surely law can be made 
as intelligible and interesting to the ordinary educated reader 
as relativity. It enters so intimately into human relationships 
that some knowledge of it is very important, not as a guide in 
specific transactions as to which a lawyer ought to be consulted, 
but as part of the mental stock-in-trade of the well-informed 
citizen. Wider realization of the difficulties of the work of 
judges and lawyers would bring about a friendlier and more 
helpful popular attitude. 

The public might understand, for example, why law does 
not progress so conspicuously and rapidly as medicine or en- 
gineering. Part of the blame rests, no doubt, upon lawyers, 
who have been less active than other professions in discussing 
and applying new ideas, but the very nature of the subject is 
an obstacle to quick change. In law, progress requires group 
action; the individual can accomplish little. The physician 
who discovers a new antitoxin, the surgeon who invents a new 
method of operating for gastric ulcer, can always, if his repu- 
tation be established, find some patient upon whom to test his 
conception. Its excellence or its faults can be rapidly proved 



64 CIVILIZATION 

to his own mind and that of any skilled onlooker. And new 
ideas, if sound, mean a larger practice and money in his pocket. 
The lawyer gets no such rewards for improving the law, and 
has no such opportunities for experiment. If he is convinced 
by observation, wide reading, and long thinking, that arrest 
for debt should be abolished, or the property of a spendthrift 
protected by law from his creditors, or trial by jury abandoned 
except in criminal trials, he cannot try out these theories upon 
some client. He must sacrifice days from his regular work to 
persuade a whole legislature to test his idea upon thousands 
of citizens, and if the idea is a bad one, the experiment will 
be a widespread disaster. Consequently law reform always 
faces an instinctive and discouraging legislative opposition. 
Even after every State except two had adopted the Uniform 
Negotiable Instruments Law, the Georgia legislature refused 
to do so because the Act abolished days of grace, the old cus- 
tom allowing a debtor three days beyond the time of payment 
named in his note. They said that when a man had promised 
to pay a debt on May i, it was un-American not to let him 
wait till May 4. Again, a committee of very able New York 
lawyers recently drew a short Practice Act setting forth the 
main requirements for the conduct of a law-suit, and leaving 
the details to the judges, who may be supposed to know more 
about their own work than the legislature. Similar laws have 
long been in successful operation in England, Massachusetts, 
and Connecticut, whereas the existing New York Code of 
Civil Procedure with its thousands of sections has been a 
vexatious source of delay and disputes in the press of urban 
litigation. The new measure was an admirable and thorough 
piece of work, endorsed by the Bar Associations of New York 
City and the State. Yet it was killed by the age-long opposi- 
tion of the country to the town. Upstate lawyers, less har- 
assed by the old Code because of uncrowded rural dockets, 
objected to throwing over their knowledge of the existing sys- 
tem and spending time to learn a new and better one. The 
legislature hated to give more power to the courts. As a re- 
sult, the new bill was scrapped, and nothing has been done 
after years of agitation except to renumber the sections of 
the old Code with a few improvements. 



THE LAW 6s 

Another factor in law reform is the existence of fifty legal 
systems in one nation. Even if the law is modernized in one 
State, the objectionable old rule will remain in the other forty- 
seven until their legislatures are persuaded by the same tedious 
process. On the other hand, this diversity has its merits. 
Some of the progressive Western States serve as experiment 
stations for testing new legal and governmental schemes. Still 
more important, the limitations on legal experimentation are 
somewhat offset by the opportunities for observation of the 
workings of different legal rules in neighbouring States. The 
possibilities of this comparative method for judging the best 
solution of a legal problem have not yet been fully utilized. 
For example, a dispute has long raged whether it is desirable 
to compel a doctor to disclose professional secrets on the wit- 
ness-stand without the patient's consent. About half the 
States require him to keep silent. The reasons given are, 
that patients will seek medical aid less freely if their confi- 
dences may be disclosed; doctors would lie to shield their 
patients; some doctors are hired by employers to treat work- 
men injured in accidents and will try to get evidence on be- 
half of the employers if they are allowed to testify. So far, 
the discussion has turned on the probability or improbability 
that these arguments represent the facts, and neither side has 
collected the facts. The discussion could be brought down to 
earth by an investigation in New York which has the privilege, 
and Massachusetts, where secrecy is not maintained. Are 
doctors less consulted in Massachusetts, do they perjure them- 
selves, do they ingratiate themselves with workmen to de- 
feat subsequent accident suits? Statistics, personal interviews 
with judges and physicians, and examination of the stenogra- 
phic records of trials ought to give valuable assistance in de- 
termining which half of the States has the better rule. 

Since law reform requires highly organized group action, 
some individual should be charged with the responsibility of 
organization. At present, it is everybody's business. Judges 
are hearing cases all day and writing opinions at night, and 
they have no legislative position as in England, where they can 
draft bills and present them in the House of Lords. Individual 
lawyers carry little weight. The Bar Associations have ac- 



66 CIVILIZATION 

complished much, but the work of their members is done with- 
out pay in the intervals of practice, and they have no official 
standing. The Attorney General is necessarily a partisan, rep- 
resenting the State's side in litigation, with neither the time 
nor the duty to improve the law in general. The United 
States and the larger States badly need a Minister of Justice. 
All complaints of legal inefficiency would come to him, and he 
would be constantly collecting statistics of the cases in the 
courts and their social consequences, observing procedure per- 
sonally, or through a corps of expert assistants, conferring with 
the judges and the Bar Associations, drafting or examining 
measures affecting the administration of justice and giving 
his opinion about them to the legislature, and charged with 
the general duty of ascertaining whether every person can find 
a certain remedy from the laws for all injuries or wrongs, ob- 
taining right and justice freely and without purchase, com- 
pletely and without denial, promptly and without delay. 

Until we establish such an official, we can rely on three in- 
struments of legal advance, each of which may be a point of co- 
operation between lawyers and laymen. Of the first, the Bar 
Associations, something has already been said. The second 
is the judiciary. Unfortunately, the tendency of the Ameri- 
can antagonism to law to concentrate on personal topics has 
warped the prolonged discussion of this branch of our govern- 
ment during the last ten years, and, indeed, since 1789. 
Charges of corruption and incompetency against individual 
judges, and methods of getting a bad judge off the bench, have 
entirely obscured the problem of getting good judges on the 
bench. The power of judges to declare statutes unconstitu- 
tional and void makes them the controlling factor in our gov- 
ernment, yet there is no country where less attention is paid 
to their selection and training. It is of no use to recall a poor 
judge by popular vote if the people are eager to put one of 
the same type in his place. Nothing need be added to the 
estimate in Bryce's " Modern Democracies " of the uneven- 
ness of judicial personnel. The most obvious need, if the in- 
ferior judges are to be brought up to the level of the best men, 
is for higher salaries. But that alone is not enough to induce 
leaders of the bar to become judges. No salary could be 



THE LAW 67 

so high as the income of successful metropolitan lawyers. 
The time has come for greater willingness on their part 
to retire from a large practice in middle life and devote 
their talents to judicial work. And even this will be useless, 
unless selection is based on merit. Our system of an elective 
judiciary is probably too deeply rooted to be entirely aban- 
doned, though it is clear that legal talent is not a quality, like 
executive ability, readily capable of being appraised by the 
electorate. On the other hand, it is not altogether certain that 
State governors would appoint judges without regard to par- 
tisan considerations. An interesting compromise plan has 
been suggested, that there should be a Chief Justice, elected 
by the people, who should be in effect the Minister of Justice 
already described. All the other judges would be appointed 
by him, for life or for long terms, while his responsibility for 
wise selections would be secured by a short term or even by 
the recall. A governor does so many tasks that his judicial 
appointments do not play a large part in the popular judgment 
of his record, but the Chief Justice would stand or fall on the 
merits of the administration of law under his management. 

Moreover, we do not deal fairly by the judges chosen under 
existing systems. After they have been selected, they should 
have more opportunity to study the special duties of their posi- 
tion before beginning work, and more leisure amid trials and 
opinions for general legal reading and for observation of the 
complexities of modern life which are inevitably involved in 
their decisions, especially on constitutional questions. Most 
litigation grows out of urban and industrial conditions, with 
which State supreme court judges may easily get out of touch, 
if they remain continuously in the State House in a small 
upstate city like Springfield, Albany, or Sacramento, with little 
opportunity to visit the factories and tenements of Chicago, 
New York, and San Francisco. It may also be doubted 
whether our usual system which restricts some judges to trials 
and others to appellate work is wise; an occasional change 
from one to the other is both refreshing and instructive. 
Judges frequently complain of the monotony of their work, 
cooped up with a few associates of similar mental interests, so 
that the atmosphere may acquire the irritability of a boarding- 



68 CIVILIZATION 

house. It is not generally understood how much judges are 
cut off from other men. Close intimacy with their former 
friends at the bar or with wealthy business men who may have 
cases before them, is sure to cause talk. Graham Wallas's 
suggestion of an occasional transfer to active work of a semi- 
judicial character, like Judge Sankey's chairmanship of the 
English Coal Commission, seems valuable. Our Interstate 
Commerce Commission would provide such an opportunity. 
Finally, the existing gulf between courts and law schools might 
be narrowed by summer conferences on growing-points in 
the law, where each side could give much out of its experience 
to the other. 

The remaining instrument of progress is the law schools. 
" Legal education," says Bryce, " is probably nowhere so thor- 
ough as in the United States." The chief reasons for this suc- 
cess are two, the professional law teacher, who has replaced 
the retired judge and the practising lawyer who lectured in 
his spare hours; and the case-system of instruction. This 
method is not, as is popularly believed, the memorization by 
the students of the facts of innumerable cases. It imparts 
legal principles, not on the say-so of a text-book or a pro- 
fessor, but by study and discussion of the actual sources of 
those principles, the decisions of the courts. The same method 
in the Continental Law would result in a class-room discus- 
sion of codes and commentators, which are there the sources. 
One of the most interesting signs of its success is its spread 
from law into other sciences such as medicine. Books based 
on the study of concrete situations are used in public schools 
for the study of geography and hygiene, and charitable societies 
work out the general needs of the community from the prob- 
lems of individual families. This system has superseded in 
all the leading law schools the old methods of lecturing and 
reading treatises. Its most conspicuous service is, of course, 
vocational, the training of men whose advice a client can safely 
accept. Already some States have required a law-school degree 
as a condition of admission to the bar, and the old haphazard 
law-office apprenticeship will eventually disappear, although 
the question of how far a man who is earning his living should 
be allowed to study law in his spare hours at a night law school 



THE LAW 69 

whose standards must usually be lower than a full-time school 
remains as a difficult problem in a democratic country. Effi- 
ciency of training conflicts with equality of opportunity. A 
second service of the leading law schools is the modernization 
of the law through the production of books. A great ex- 
ample of this is the " Treatise on Evidence," by John H. Wig- 
more, dean of Northwestern Law School, which is every day 
influencing courts and renovating the most antiquated por- 
tion of the common law. 

Of late years, the need for fresh changes in method has be- 
come plain. Christopher Columbus Langdell, the inventor of 
the case-system, laid down ,two fundamental propositions: 
"First, that law is a science; second, that all the available 
materials of that science are contained in printed books." Ex- 
perience has proved that he was right in believing that attend- 
ance in a lawyer's office or at the proceedings of courts was 
not essential to a legal education. But the scope of legal 
study must now extend beyond printed books, certainly beyond 
law books. Since law is not an isolated department of knowl- 
edge, but a system of rules for the regulation of human life, 
the truth of those rules must be tested by many facts outside 
the past proceedings of courts and legislatures. Not only 
law in books but law in action has to be considered, and after 
learning the principles evolved by a process of inclusion and 
exclusion in the decisions or by intermittent legislative action, 
the scholar must find how those principles actually work in 
the bank, the factory, the street, and the jail. The problem 
is still debated, whether this can better be done in the pre- 
legal college course or by the use of non-legal experts in the 
law schools, or whether the necessary material should be 
assimilated and presented by the law teachers themselves. Yet 
this widening of the content of legal study does not in the least 
impair the validity of Langdell's method, the systematic inves- 
tigation of the sources of law at first hand, whether those 
sources be found in the reports and statutes which he had in 
mind, or in the economic, social, and psychological facts which 
have demanded attention in recent years. 

Something must be said in closing of those portions of the 
law where change has been most necessary. Of these our 



70 CIVILIZATION 

criminal law is easily the most disgraceful. Its complete in- 
ability to perform its task has been exhaustively demonstrated 
by the opening chapter of Raymond Fosdick's " American 
Police Systems." The lawyers and judges are only partly 
to blame, for their work forms only the middle of three stages 
in the suppression of crime. The initial stage of arrest and 
the final stage of punishment are in the hands of administrative 
officials, beyond the control of the bench and bar. Many 
criminals are never caught, and the loss of public confidence 
in the justice or effectiveness of prisons makes juries reluc- 
tant to convict. Yet the legal profession is sorely at fault for 
what takes place while the prisoner is in the dock. The whole 
problem calls for that co-operation between lawyers, other 
experts, and laymen, of which I have already spoken. Un- 
less something is soon done, we may find crime ceasing to be 
a legal matter at all. Even now, many large department stores 
have so little belief in the criminal courts and prisons that 
they are trying embezzlers and shoplifters in tribunals of 
their own, and administering a private system of probation 
and restitution. The initial step is a reformulation of the pur- 
pose of punishment. Twenty-five years ago. Justice Holmes 
asked, " What have we better than a blind guess to show that 
the criminal law in its present form does more good than 
harm? " 

One serious reason for its breakdown has been the creation 
of innumerable minor offences, which are repeatedly committed 
and almost impossible to suppress. The police are diverted 
from murders and burglaries to gambling and sexual delin- 
quencies, while the frequent winking at such breaches of law 
destroys the essential popular conviction that a law ought to 
be obeyed just because it is law. The Chief of Police of New 
Orleans told Raymond Fosdick, " If I should enforce the law 
against selling tobacco on Sunday, I would be run out of office 
in twenty-four hours. But I am in constant danger of being 
run out of office because I don't enforce it." So they were 
hanging green curtains, which served the double purpose of 
advertising the location of the stands and of protecting the 
virtue of the citizens from visions of evil. 

At the present time we have thrown a new strain on the 



THE LAW 71 

criminal law by the enactment of nation-wide prohibition. The 
future will show whether the main effect of this measure will 
be an increase in disrespect and antagonism for law, or the 
ultimate removal of one of the chief causes of lawlessness 
and waste. Unfortunately, the perpetual discussion of home- 
brew receipts and hidden sources of supply has prevented a 
general realization that we are witnessing one of the most far- 
reaching legislative experiments of all time. What we ought 
to be talking about is the consequences of prohibition to health, 
poverty, crime, earning-power, and general happiness. It is 
possible, for instance, that total abstinence for the working 
classes coupled with apparently unlimited supplies of liquor 
for their employers may have the double consequence of in- 
creasing the resentful desire of the former to wrest the con- 
trol of wealth from those who are monopolizing a time- 
honoured source of pleasure, and of weakening the ability of 
the heavy-drinking sons of our captains of industry to stand 
up in the struggle against the sober brains of the labour leaders 
of the future. Prohibition may thus bring about a striking 
shift of economic power. 

The delays, expense, and intricacies of legal procedure de- 
mand reform. The possession of a legal right is worthless to 
a poor man if he cannot afford to enforce it through the courts. 
The means of removing such obstacles have been set forth by 
Reginald H. Smith in " Justice and the Poor." For instance, 
much has already been accomplished by Small Claims Courts, 
where relief is given without lawyers in a very simple manner. 
When a Cleveland landlady was sued by a boarder because she 
had detained his trunk, she told the judge that he had set fire 
to his mattress while smoking in bed and refused to pay her 
twenty-five dollars for the damage. The judge, instead of 
calling expert witnesses to prove the value of the mattress, 
telephoned the nearest department store, found he could buy 
another for eight dollars, and the parties agreed to settle on 
that basis. Again, family troubles are now scattered through 
numerous courts. A father deserts, and the mother goes to 
work. The neglected children get into the Juvenile Court. 
She asks for a separation in the Probate Court. A grocer sues 
her husband for food she has bought, before a jury. She 



72 CIVILIZATION 

prosecutes him before a criminal court for non-support, and 
finally secures a divorce in equity. One Court of Domestic 
Relations should handle all the difficulties of the family, which 
ought to be considered together. Much of the injustice to 
the poor has been lessened by legal aid societies, which have 
not only conducted litigation for individuals but have also 
fought test-cases up to the highest courts, and drafted statutes 
in order to protect large groups of victims of injustice. The 
injury done to the poor by antiquated legal machinery is re- 
ceiving wide attention, but it is also a tax on large business 
transactions which is ultimately paid by the consumer. Re- 
form is needed to secure justice to the rich. 

The substantive law which determines the scope of rights 
and duties has been more completely overhauled, and many 
great improvements have been accomplished. Relations be- 
tween the public and the great corporations which furnish 
transportation and other essential services are no longer left 
to the arbitrary decisions of corporate officers or the slow 
process of isolated litigation. Public service commissions do 
not yet operate perfectly, but any one who doubts their de- 
sirability should read a contemporary Commission Report and 
then turn to the history of the Erie Railroad under Jim Fiske 
and Jay Gould as related in " The Book of Daniel Drew." 
The old fellow-servant rule which threw the burden of an in- 
dustrial accident upon the victim has been changed by work- 
men's compensation acts which place the risk upon the em- 
ployer. He pays for the injured workman as for a broken 
machine and shifts the expense to his customers as part of 
the costs of the business. The burden is distributed through 
society and litigation is rapid and inexpensive. Unfortunately, 
no such satisfactory solution has been reached in the law of 
labour organizations, but its chaotic condition only corresponds 
to the general American uncertainty on the proper treatment 
of such organizations. It is possible that just as the King, 
in the Middle Ages, insisted on dragging the Barons into his 
courts to fight out their boundary disputes there, instead of 
with swords and battleaxes on the highway, so society which 
is the victim of every great industrial dispute will force em- 
ployers and workmen alike to settle their differences before a 



THE LAW 73 

tribunal while production goes on. The Australian Courts of 
Conciliation have lately been imitated in Kansas, an experi- 
ment which will be watched with close interest. 

Less importance must be attached, however, to the develop- 
ment of particular branches of the law than to the change 
in legal attitude. The difference between the old and the new 
is exemplified by two extracts from judicial decisions which 
were almost contemporaneous. Judge Werner, in holding the 
first New York Workmen's Compensation Act unconstitutional, 
limited the scope of law as follows: 

" This quoted summary of the report of the commission to 
the legislature, which clearly and fairly epitomizes what is 
more fully set forth in the body of the report, is based upon 
a most voluminous array of statistical tables, extracts from 
the works of philosophical writers and the industrial laws of 
many countries, all of which are designed to show that our 
own system of dealing with industrial accidents is economi- 
cally, morally, and legally unsound. Under our form of gov- 
ernment, however, courts must regard all economical, philo- 
sophical and moral theories, attractive and desirable though 
they may be, as subordinate to the primary question whether 
they can be moulded into statutes without infringing upon 
the letter or spirit of our written constitutions. . . . With 
these considerations in mind we turn to the purely legal phases 
of the controversy." (Ives v. South Buffalo Ry. Co., 201 N. Y. 
271,287, 1911.) 

A different attitude was shown by the Supreme Court of the 
United States in its reception of the brief filed by Mr. Louis 
D. Brandeis on behalf of the constitutionality of an Oregon 
statute limiting woman's work to ten hours a day. Besides 
decisions, he included the legislation of many States and of 
European countries. Then follow extracts from over ninety 
reports of committees, bureaus of statistics, commissioners of 
hygiene, inspectors of factories, both in this country and in 
Europe, to the effect that long hours of labour are dangerous 
for women, primarily because of their special physical organi- 
zation. Following them are extracts from similar reports dis- 
cussing the general benefits of shorter hours from the eco- 
nomic aspect of the question. Justice Brewer said: 



74 CIVILIZATION 

" The legislation and opinions referred to in the margin may 
not be, technically speaking, authorities, and in them is little 
or no discussion of the constitutional question presented to us 
for determination, yet they are significant of a widespread 
belief that woman's physical structure, and the functioi\^ she 
performs in consequence thereof, justify special legislation re- 
stricting or qualifying the conditions under which she should be 
permitted to toil. Constitutional questions, it is true, are not 
settled by even a consensus of present public opinion, for it is 
a peculiar value of a written constitution that it places in un- 
changing form limitations upon legislative action, and thus 
gives a permanence and stability to popular government which 
otherwise would be lacking. At the same time, when a ques- 
tion of fact is debated and debatable, and the extent to which 
a special constitutional limitation goes is affected by the truth 
in respect to that fact, a widespread and long continued belief 
concerning it is worthy of consideration. We take judicial 
cognizance of all matters of general knowledge." (Muller v. 
Oregon, 208 U. S. 412, 420, 1907.) 

The decision displays two qualities which are characteristic 
of the winning counsel since his elevation to the bench; it 
keeps its eye on the object instead of devoting itself to abstract 
conceptions, and it emphasizes the interest of society in new 
forms of protection against poverty, disease, and other evils. 
To these social interests, the property of the individual must 
often be partly sacrificed and in recent years we have seen the 
courts upholding the guarantee of bank deposits. State regula- 
tion of insurance rates, and suspension of the right of land- 
lords to recover unreasonable rents or dispossess their tenants. 
All this would have been regarded as impossible fifty years 
ago. 

These extensions of governmental power over property have 
been accompanied by legislation severely restricting freedom 
of discussion of still more radical types of State control. It is 
argued that the right of free speech must face limitation like 
the right of the landlord. The true policy is exactly the oppo- 
site. Not only is it unjust for the State to carry out one form 
of confiscation while severely punishing the discussion of an- 
other form, but in an age of new social devices the widest lib- 



THE LAW 75 

erty for the expression of opinion is essential, so that the 
merits and demerits of any proposed plan may be thoroughly 
known and comparisons made between it and alternative 
schemes, no matter how radical these alternatives may be. A 
body of law that was determined to stand still might discourage 
thought with no serious damage; but law which is determined 
to move needs the utmost possible light so that it may be sure 
of moving forward. 

No one has expressed so well the new importance of social 
interests, and the value of freedom of speech; no one, indeed, 
has expressed so nobly the task and hopes of American Law, 
as the man of whom it is said that among the long list of 
American judges, he seems " the only one who has framed for 
himself a system of legal ideas and general truths of life, and 
composed his opinions in harmony with the system already 
framed." (John H. Wigmore, " Justice Holmes and the Law 
of Torts," 29 Harv. L. Rev. 601.) Yet no one has been more 
cautious than Justice Holmes in warning us not to expect too 
much from law. 

" The law, so far as it depends on learning, is indeed, as it 
has been called, the government of the living by the dead. It 
cannot be helped, it is as it should be, that the law is behind 
the times. As law embodies beliefs that have triumphed in 
the battle of ideas and then have translated themselves into 
action, while there is still doubt, while opposite convictions still 
keep a battle front against each other, the time for law has 
not come; the notion destined to prevail is not yet entitled to 
the field." " Collected Legal Papers," 138, 294.) 

It is the work of the present generation of American lawyers 
to be sure that the right side wins in the many conflicts now 
waging. We cannot be certain that the law will make itself ra- 
tional, while we remain as inactive as in the past, absorbed in 
our own routine, and occasionally pausing to say, " All's right 
with the world "; for, to quote Holmes once more, " The mode 
in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort." 

Zechariah Chafee, Jr. 



EDUCATION 

IF Henry Adams had lived in the 13th century he would have 
found the centre of a world of unity in the most powerful 
doctrine of the church, the cult of the Virgin Mary. Living 
in the 19th century he sums up his experience in a world of 
multiplicity as the attempt to realize for himself the saving 
faith of that world in what is called education. Adams was 
not the first to be struck with the similarity of the faiths of 
the mediaeval and the modern world. This comparison is the 
subject of an article by Professor Barrett Wendell published 
in the North American Review for 1904 and entitled " The 
Great American Superstition ": 

" Undefined and indefinite as it is, the word education is 
just now a magic one; from the Atlantic to the Pacific, it is 
the most potent with which you can conjure money out of 
public chests or private pockets. Let social troubles declare 
themselves anywhere, lynchings, strikes, trusts, immigration, 
racial controversies, whatever you chance to hold most threat- 
ening, and we are gravely assured on every side that educa- 
tion is the only thing which can preserve our coming genera- 
tions from destruction. What is more, as a people we listen 
credulously to these assurances. We are told, and we believe 
and evince magnificent faith in our belief, that our national 
salvation must depend on education." 

Professor Wendell goes on trenchantly to compare this reign- 
ing modern faith with that in the mediaeval church. He calls 
attention to the fact that whereas the dominant architectural 
monuments of the Old World are great cathedrals and reli- 
gious houses, implying the faith that salvation could be assured 
by unstinted gifts to the church, in our modern times the most 
stately and impressive structures are our schools, colleges, and 
public libraries, many of them, like the cathedrals, erected 

77 



78 CIVILIZATION 

by sinners of wealth in the pursuit of individual atonement 
and social salvation. " Ask any American what we shall do 
to be saved, and if he speak his mind he will probably bid 
us educate our fellow-men." He might have extended his 
comparison to the personal hierarchy of the two institutions, 
for at the time of his article the President of Harvard spoke 
to the people of the United States with the voice of Inno- 
cent III, surrounded by his advisers among university presi- 
dents and superintendents gathered like Cardinal Archbishops, 
in the conclave of the National Education Association, of which 
the Committee of Ten was a sort of papal curia. Although 
the educational papacy has fallen into schism, the cities are 
still ruled by superintendents like bishops, the colleges by 
president and deans, like abbots and priors, and the whole 
structure rests on a vast population of teachers holding their 
precarious livings like the parish priests at the will of their 
superiors, tempered by public opinion. Indeed, Professor 
Wendell is struck by the probability that as European society 
was encumbered by the itinerant friars, so America will have 
" its mendicant orders of scholars — the male and female doc- 
tors of philosophy." But it is his main theme which con- 
cerns us here, that " the present mood of our country concern- 
ing education is neither more nor less than a mood of blind, 
mediaeval superstition.'" 

The difference between faith as religion and as superstition 
may be hard to define, the terms having become somewhat in- 
terchangeable through controversy, but in general we should 
doubtless use the pragmatic test. A vital and saving faith 
which actually justifies itself by results is religion; a faith 
which is without constructive effect on character and society, 
and is merely fanciful, fantastic, or degrading we call super- 
stition. The old education which America brought from 
England and inherited from the Renaissance was a reasonable 
faith. It consisted of mathematics, classics, and theology, and 
while it produced, except in rare instances, no mathematicians, 
classical scholars, or theologians, it trained minds for the 
learned professions of those days and it gave the possessors 
of it intellectual distinction, and admitted them to the society 



EDUCATION 79 

of cultivated men everywhere. Its authority was largely tradi- 
tional, but it worked in the world of that day much as the 
thirty-three Masonic degrees do in the world of Masonry. It 
may properly be called a religion, and in its rigid, prescribed, 
dogmatic creed it may be compared to the mediaeval theology. 
At any rate, it suffered the same fate and from the same cause. 
Its system was too narrow for the expanding knowledge and 
the multiplying phenomena of the advancing hour. It failed 
to take account of too many things. The authority of tradi- 
tion, by which it maintained its position, was challenged and 
overthrown, and private judgment was set in its place. 

Private judgment in education is represented by the elective 
system; President Eliot was the Luther of this movement 
and Harvard College his Wittenberg. Exactly as after the 
Reformation, however, the attitudes of assertion and subservi- 
ence in spiritual matters continued to manifest themselves 
where the pope had been deposed, in Geneva and Dort and 
Westminster, so in spite of the anarchy of the elective system 
the educational function continues to impose itself in its tradi- 
tional robes of authority, and to be received with the rever- 
ence due to long custom. And in this way education in 
America from being a saving faith has become an illusion. 
The old education, its authority challenged, its sway limited, 
and nobody caring whether its followers can quote Latin or 
not, is in the position of the Church of Rome; the so-called 
new education, uncertain in regard to material and method, 
direction and destination, is like the anarchic Protestant sects. 
Neither possesses authority; the old system has lost it, and 
the new ones have never had it. They are alike in depending 
upon the blindness of the masses which is superstition. 

Although the generalization remains true that the mood of 
America toward education is a mood of superstition, there are 
certain forms of education operative in America to-day which 
approve themselves by performance and justify the reasonable 
faith in which they are held. The argument in favour of the 
elective system, by force of which it displaced the prescribed 
classical course, was that it was necessary to give opportunity 
for specialization. This opportunity it has given, and in cer- 



8o CIVILIZATION 

tain directions the results produced by American institutions 
are of high value. Our scientific education is the most ad- 
vanced, and in the professions which depend upon it, engi- 
neering and medicine, our product doubtless " compares fa- 
vourably " with that of Europe, These facts cannot be cited, 
however, as a valid reason for the American faith in educa- 
tion as a whole. It is recognized to-day that progress in 
natural science has far outrun that in politics, social life, cul- 
ture — therein lies the tragedy of the world. A few men of 
science have a knowledge of the means by which the human 
race can be destroyed in a brief space — and no statesmen, 
philosophers, or apostles of culture have the power to per- 
suade the human race not to permit it to be done. 

In another direction a great increase of specialization has 
taken place — in the preparation for business. Our colleges 
of business administration rival our scientific schools in the 
exactness of their aim, and the precision of their effort. Here 
again, however, it may be questioned whether their success 
is one to justify belief in the educational process as a whole. 
The result of such specialization upon the business organiza- 
tion of society can hardly be to arouse a critical, and hence 
truly constructive, attitude in regard to the whole economic 
problem; it is nearly certain to promote a disposition to take 
advantage of the manifest shortcomings of that organization 
for individual successful achievement. Whether society as a 
whole will profit by the efforts of such experts as our business 
colleges are turning out remains to be seen. Whether we are 
wise in strengthening the predatory elements which put a strain 
on the social organization, at a time when the whole structure 
is trembling, is open to question. Here again the faith of 
America in education as social salvation is not justified by indi- 
vidual results, however brilliant and fortunate. 

The value of the specialist to society is unquestionable, 
but he alone will not save it. Such salvation must come from 
the diffusion and validity of the educational process as a whole, 
from the men and women of active intelligence, broad view, 
wide sympathy, and resolute character who are fitted as a 
result of it to see life steadily and see it whole, reason soundly 
to firm conclusions in regard to it, and hold those decisions in 



EDUCATION 8i 

the face of death. The specialist indeed may be considered 
a necessary subtraction from the general social army, a person 
set apart for special duty, whose energies are concentrated and 
loyalties narrowed. We expect him to die, if need be, in main- 
taining that the world moves, but not for freedom of thought 
in the abstract. It is by the generally trained, all-round prod- 
uct of our education that the system must be judged. And 
what do we find? 

The general student, it appears, tends to be the product of 
as narrow a process as the specialist, but not as deep. As the 
demands of specialization become more exacting, its require- 
ments reach farther and farther back into the field of general 
education, and more and more of the area is restricted to its 
uses. The general student in consequence becomes a specialist 
in what is left over. Moreover, he exercises his right of pri- 
vate judgment and free election along the path of least resist- 
ance. Laboratory science he abhors as belonging to a course 
of specialization which he has renounced. The classics and 
mathematics, to which a good share of our educational ma- 
chinery is still by hereditary right devoted, he scorns as hav- 
ing no raison d'etre except an outworn tradition. With the 
decline of the classics has gone the preliminary training for 
modern languages, which the general student usually finds 
too exacting and burdensome, and from the obligation of which 
colleges and secondary institutions also are now rapidly reliev- 
ing him. We boasted in the late war that we had no quarrel 
with the German language, and yet by our behaviour we recog- 
nized that one of the fruits of victory was the annihilation of 
at least one foreign speech within our borders. The general 
student is thus confined, by right of private judgment of 
course, to his own language and literature, and such super- 
ficial studies in history and social science as he can accomplish 
with that instrument alone. His view is therefore narrow and 
insular. His penetration is slight. He is, in short, a special- 
ist in the obvious. 

Not only does the general student tend to be as restricted 
in subject-matter as the specialist, but he lacks the training 
in investigation, reasoning, and concentration which the lat- 
ter's responsibility for independent research imposes. The 



82 CIVILIZATION 

definition of the aim of general education on which Professor 
Wendell rested his case for the old curriculum in the article 
quoted above, is " such training as shall enable a man to 
devote his faculties intently to matters which of themselves 
do not interest him." Now clearly if the student persistently 
chooses only the subjects which interest him, and follows them 
only as far as his interest extends, he escapes all training 
in voluntary attention and concentration. In his natural dis- 
position to avoid mental work he finds ready accomplices in 
his instructors and text-book writers. They realize that they 
are on trial, and that interest alone is the basis of the verdict. 
Accordingly they cheerfully assume the burden of preliminary 
digestion of material, leaving to the student the assimilation 
of so much as his queasy stomach can bear. One way in 
which the study of English literature or history can be made 
a matter of training in criticism and reasoning is to send the 
student to the sources, the original material, and hold him 
responsible for his conclusions. He may gain a wrong or in- 
adequate view, but at any rate it is his own, and it affords him 
a solid basis for enlargement or correction. Instead of this 
the student is invited to a set of criticisms and summaries 
already made, and is usually discouraged if by chance he 
attempts a verification on his own account. The actual read- 
ing of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Swift, Burke will give the 
student at least a certain training in concentration; but this 
is hard, slow, and dry work. It is much easier and more com- 
prehensive, instead of reading one play of Shakespeare, to 
read about all the plays, including the life of the author, his 
dramatic art, and some speculations in regard to the Eliza- 
bethan stage. It was William James who pointed out the 
difference between knowledge about and acquaintance with an 
author. The extent to which we have substituted for the 
direct vision, with its stimulating appeal to individual reaction, 
the conventional summary and accepted criticism, the official 
formula and the stereotyped view, is the chief reason for the 
ready-made uniformity of our educated product. 

The pioneer democracy of America itself is responsible for 
a method of instruction typically American. The superstitious 
faith in education was the basis of a system whereby many 



EDUCATION 83 

busy, middle-aged persons whose early advantages had been 
limited, by means of attractive summaries, outlines, and hand- 
books, could acquaint themselves with the names of men, 
books, and events which form the Binet-Simon test of culture, 
and enable the initiate to hold up his head in circles where 
the best that has been thought or said in the world is habitu- 
ally referred to. This method is carried out in hundreds of 
cultural camp-meetings every summer, by thousands of popu- 
lar lectures, in countless programmes of study for women's 
clubs. Unfortunately it is coming to be not only the typical 
but the only method of general education in America. Chau- 
tauqua has penetrated the college and the university. Better 
that our fathers had died, their intellectual thirst unsatisfied, 
than that they had left this legacy of mental soft drinks for 
their children. 

Thus far I have had the college chiefly in mind, but the 
same observations apply equally to the secondary school. The 
elective system has made its way thither, and indeed one of 
the chief difficulties of organizing a college curriculum for the 
general student which shall represent something in the way 
of finding things out, of reasoning from facts to conclusions, 
and of training in voluntary attention, is that of determining 
any common ground on the basis of previous attainment. Not 
only the elective system but the Chautauqua method has largely 
permeated our high schools. The teachers, often on annual 
appointment, more than the college instructors, with compara- 
tive security of tenure, are dependent on the favour of pupils, 
a favour to be maintained in competition with dances, movies, 
and The Saturday Evening Post, by interesting them. It is 
therefore a common thing for teachers to repeat in diluted form 
the courses which they took in college — and which in the 
original were at best no saturate solutions of the subject. The 
other day, on visiting a class in Shakespeare at a Y.M.C.A. 
school, I ventured to suggest to the teacher that the method 
used was rather advanced. '' Ah, but my daughter at high 
school," he said, " is having Professor Blank's course in the 
mediaeval drama." Now such a course intended for graduate 
students investigating sources, influences^ and variations among 
saints' plays and mystery plays, could have no educational 



84 CIVILIZATION 

value in material or method for a high-school pupil, but it was, 
no doubt, as interesting as a Persian tale. 

Inasmuch as the colleges and the secondary schools are both 
uncertain as regards the meaning and aim of general educa- 
tion, it is not surprising to find the grade schools also at sea, 
their pupils the victims both of meaningless tradition and reck- 
less experiment. The tradition of our grade schools, educa- 
tional experts tell us, was brought by Horace Mann from Prus- 
sia. There the Volkschide was designed for the children of 
the people, who should be trained with a view to remaining 
in the station in which they had been born. At least, it may 
be conceded, the German designers of the system had a purpose 
in mind, and knew the means to attain it; but both purpose 
and means are strangely at variance with American conditions 
and ideals. Other experts have pointed out the extraordinary 
retarding of the educational process after the first years, when 
the child learns by a natural objective method some of the most 
difficult processes of physical life, accomplishing extraordinary 
feats of understanding and control; and some of the most hope- 
ful experiments in primary education look toward continuing 
this natural method for a longer time. At present the prin- 
ciple of regimentation seems to be the most important one in 
the grade school, and as the pace is necessarily that of the 
slowest, the pupils in general have a large amount of slack rope 
which it is the problem of principals and teachers to draw in 
and coil up. Altogether the grade school represents a degree 
of waste and misdirection which would in itself account for 
the tendencies toward mental caprice or stagnation which are 
evident in the pupils who proceed from it. 

Thus the parallel which Professor Wendell established be- 
tween our educational system and the mediaeval church would 
seem to have a certain foundation. In the colleges, as in the 
monasteries, we have a group of ascetic specialists, sustained 
in their labours by an apocalyptic vision of a world which they 
can set on fire, and in which no flesh can live; and a mass of 
idle, pleasure-loving youth of both sexes, except where some 
Abbot Samson arises, with strong-arm methods momentarily 
to reduce them to order and industry. In the high schools, 



EDUCATION 8s 

as in the cathedrals, we have great congregations inspired by 
the music, the lights, the incense, assisting at a ceremony of 
which the meaning is as little understood as the miracle of 
the mass. In the grade schools, as in the parish churches, we 
have the humble workers, like Chaucer's poor parson of the 
town, trying with pathetic endeavour to meet the needs and 
satisfy the desires of their flocks, under conditions of an edu- 
cational and political tyranny no less galling than was the 
ecclesiastical. 

But, we may well enquire, whence does this system draw its 
power to impose itself upon the masses? — for even superstition 
must have a sign which the blind can read, and a source of 
appeal to human nature. The answer bears out still further 
Professor Wendell's parallel. The mediaeval church drew its 
authority from God, and to impose that authority upon the 
masses it invented the method of propaganda. It claimed to 
be able to release men from the burden which oppressed them 
most heavily, their sins, and in conjunction with the secular 
power it enforced its claims against all gainsayers, treating the 
obstinate among them with a series of penalties, penance, ex- 
communication, the stake. Education finds its authority in 
the human reason, and likewise imposes that authority by 
propaganda. It too claims the power of salvation from the 
evils which oppress men most sorely to-day — the social malad- 
justments, " lynchings, strikes, trusts, immigration, racial con- 
troversies " — and it is in alliance with the secular power to 
preserve its monopoly of social remedies from the competition 
of anything like direct action. Now it is clear that in the 
religion of Christ in its pure form the church had a basis for 
its claims to possess a power against sin, and a means of salva- 
tion. Similarly it may be maintained that human reason, 
allowed to act freely and disinterestedly, would be sufficient 
to cope with the evils of our time and bring about a social 
salvation. Indeed, it is curious to remark how nearly the 
intellectual conclusions of reason have come to coincide with 
the intuitive wisdom of Jesus. The church was faithless to its 
mission by alliance with temporal power, by substituting its 
own advancement for the will of God, by becoming an end in 



86 CIVILIZATION 

itself. Education likewise is by way of being faithless to 
itself, by alliance with secular power, political and financial, 
by the substitution of its own institutional advancement for 
disinterested service of truth, by becoming likewise an end in 
itself. 

In one of the most remarkable pronouncements of the pres- 
ent commencement season, President Hopkins of Dartmouth 
College summarized the influences which make against what he 
calls Verihood. They are first, Insufficiency of mentality, or 
over-prof essionalization of point of view; second. Inertia of 
mentality or closed mindedness; and third, False emphasis of 
mentality or propaganda. The late war and its evil after- 
math have put in high relief the extent of this third influence. 
President Hopkins speaks as one of the Cardinal Archbishops 
of Education, and I quote his words with the authority which 
his personality and position give them : 

" Now that the war is passed, the spirit of propaganda still 
remains in the reluctance with which is returned to an impa- 
tient people the ancient right of access to knowledge of the 
truth, the right of free assembly, and the right of freedom of 
speech. Meanwhile the hesitancy with which these are re- 
turned breeds in large groups vague suspicion and acrimonious 
distrust of that which is published as truth, and which actu- 
ally is true, so that on all sides we hear the query whether 
we are being indulged with what is considered good for us, 
or with that which constitutes the facts. Thus we impair the 
validity of truth and open the door and give opportunity for 
authority which is not justly theirs to be ascribed to falsehood 
and deceit." 

The war was a test which showed how feeble was the hold 
of American education upon the principle which alone can 
give it validity. Nowhere was the suppression of freedom of 
mind, of truth, so energetic, so vindictive as in the schools. 
Instances crowd upon the mind. I remember attending the 
trial of a teacher before a committee of the New York School 
Board, the point being whether his reasons for not entering 
with his class upon a discussion of the Soviet government con- 



EDUCATION 87 

cealed a latent sympathy with that form of social organization. 
The pupils were ranged in two groups, Jews and Gentiles, and 
were summoned in turn to give their testimony — they had 
previously been educated in the important functions of modern 
American society, espionage, and mass action. Another occa- 
sion is commemorated by the New York Evening Post, the 
teacher being on trial for disloyalty and the chief count in his 
indictment that he desired an early peace; and his accuser, one 
Dr. John Tildsley, an Archdeacon or superintendent of the 
diocese of New York under Bishop Ettinger: 

" Are you interested in having this man discharged?" 

" I am," said Dr. Tildsley. 

" Do you know of any act that would condemn him as a 
teacher? " 

" Yes," said Dr. Tildsley, " he favoured an early peace." 

" Don't you want an early, victorious peace? " 

" Why ask me a question like that? " 

" Because I want to show you how unfair you have been to 
this teacher." 

" But Mr. Mufson wanted an early peace without victory/' 
said Dr. Tildsley. 

" He didn't say that, did he? He did not say an early 
peace without victory? " 

" No." 

" Then you don't want an early peace, do you? " 

"No." 

" You want a prolongation of all this world misery? " 

" To a certain extent, yes," said Dr. Tildsley. 

Nor did the sabotage of truth stop with school boards and 
superintendents. A colleague of mine writing a chapter of a 
text-book in modern history made the statement that the Brit- 
ish government entered the war because of an understanding 
with France, the invasion of Belgium being the pretext which 
appealed to popular enthusiasm — to which a great publishing 
house responded that this statement would arouse much indig- 
nation among the American people, and must therefore be 
suppressed. 



88 CIVILIZATION 

We need not be surprised that since the war education has 
not shown a disinterested and impartial attitude toward the 
phenomena of human affairs, a reliance on the method of trial 
and error, of experiment and testimony^ which it has evolved. 
Teachers who are openly, or even latently, in sympathy with a 
form of social organization other than the regime of private 
control of capital are banned from schools and colleges with 
candle, with book, and with bell. Text-books which do not 
agree with the convenient view of international relations are 
barred. Superintendents like Ettinger and Tildsley in New 
York are the devoted apologists for the system to which 
they owe their greatness. To its position among the vested 
interests of the world, to the prosperity of its higher clergy, 
education has sacrificed its loyalty to that which alone can 
give it authority. 

The prevention of freedom of thought and enquiry is of 
course necessary so long as the purpose of education is to 
produce belief rather than to stimulate thought. The belief 
which it is the function of education to propagate is that 
in the existing order. Hence we find the vast effort known 
as " Americanization," which is for the most part a perfect 
example of American education at the present day. The spirit 
of " Americanization " is to consider the individual not with 
reference to his inward growth of mind and spirit, but solely 
with a view to' his worldly success, and his relation to the 
existing order of society, to which it is considered that the 
individual will find his highest happiness and usefulness in 
contributing. This programme naturally enough finds a spon- 
sor in the American Legion, but it is truly disconcerting to 
find the National Education Association entering into alliance 
with this super-legal body, appointing a standing committee to 
act in co-operation with the Legion throughout the year, ac- 
cepting the offer of the Legion to give lectures in the schools, 
and endorsing the principle of the Lusk Law in New York, 
which imposes the test of an oath of allegiance to the Govern- 
ment as a requirement for a teacher's certificate. 

We have now the chief reason why education remains the 
dominant superstition of our time; but one may still wonder 
how an institution which is apparently so uncertain of its pur- 



EDUCATION 89 

pose and methods can continue to exercise such influence on 
the minds and hearts of men. The answer is, of course, that 
education is not in the least doubtful of its purpose and meth- 
ods. Though the humble and obscure teacher, like the Lollard 
parson, may puzzle his brains about the why and how and 
purpose of his being here, his superiors, the bishops, the papal 
curia, know the reason. Education is the propaganda depart- 
ment of the State, and the existing social system. Its reso- 
lute insistence upon the essential rightness of things as they 
are, coupled with its modest promise to reform them if neces- 
sary, is the basis of the touching confidence with which it is 
received. It further impose? itself upon the credulity of the 
people by the magnificence of its establishment. The aca- 
demic splendour of the commencement season when the hier- 
archs bestow their favours, and honour each other and their 
patrons by higher degrees, is of enormous value in impressing 
the public. Especially to the uneducated does this majesty 
appeal. That an institution which holds so fair an outlook 
on society, which is on such easy and sympathetic terms with 
all that is important in the nation, which commands the ave- 
nues by which men go forward in the world, should be able to 
guarantee success in life to its worshippers is nothing at which 
to be surprised. Hence we find the poor of different grades 
making every sacrifice to send sons and daughters through 
high school, through college, in the same pathetic faith with 
which they once burned candles to win respite for the souls 
of their dead. 

There are reasons, however, for thinking that the super- 
stition is passing. In the first place, nowhere do we find more 
scepticism in regard to the pretensions of education than among 
those who have been educated, and this number is rapidly 
increasing. In the second place, the alliance between educa- 
tion and a social system depending on private capital is too 
obvious, and the abrogation of the true functions of the for- 
mer is too complete. The so-called Americanization campaign 
is so crude an attempt to put something over that even the un- 
sophisticated foreigner whom it is intended to impress watches 
the pictures or reads the pamphlets which set forth the happy 
estate of the American workman, with his tongue in his cheek. 



90 CIVILIZATION 

The social groups which feel aggrieved under the present or- 
der are marking their defection by seceding from the educa- 
tional system and setting up labour universities of their own. 
So serious is this secession that New York has passed the Lusk 
Law, designed to bring the independent movement under State 
control. In the third place, the claim of education to be an 
open sesame to success in life is contradicted by the position 
of its most constant votaries, the teachers. The prestige which 
used to attach to the priests of learning and which placed them 
above the lure of riches has vanished; their economic station 
has declined until even college professors have fallen into the 
servantless class, which means the proletariat. Truly for such 
as they to declare that education means success in life is a 
dismal paradox. 

Another sign of approaching reformation in the educational 
system is to be found in the frankly corrupt practices which 
infest it. Here the parallel to the mediaeval church is not 
exact, for in the latter it was the m.onasteries and religious 
houses that were the chief sources of offence, while the col- 
leges and private institutions of higher learning which corre- 
spond to them are singularly free from anything worse than 
wasteful internal politics. It is the public educational system 
which by reason of its contact with political government par- 
takes most palpably of the corruption that attends the demo- 
cratic State. It is unnecessary to mention the forms which 
this corruption takes where a school board of trustees by 
political appointment is given the exploitation of the schools — 
the favouritism in appointments and promotions, the graft in 
text-books and equipment, the speculation in real estate and 
building contracts, the alienation of school property. There is 
scarcely a large city in the country in which pupils and teach- 
ers alike are not shamefully and scandalously defrauded by 
action of school trustees which can be characterized in the 
mildest terms as wilful mismanagement conducing to private 
profit. 

There are two things necessary to the reform of educa- 
tion. One is democratic control, that is, management of in- 
stitutions of teaching by the teachers. It is to be noted that 



EDUCATION 91 

this is the demand everywhere of labour which respects itself 
— control of the means of production and responsibility for 
the result. Surely the teachers should be one of the first 
groups of toilers to be so trusted. Under democratic control 
the spoliation of the schools by politicians, the sacrifice of 
education to propaganda, the tyranny of the hierarchy can 
be successfully resisted. Once the teachers are released from 
servile bondage to the public through the political masters who 
control appointments and promotions, they will deal with their 
problems with more authority, and be independent of the 
suffrage of the pupils. Through joint responsibility of the 
workers for the product they will arrive at that esprit de corps 
which consists in thinking in terms of the enterprise rather 
than of the job, and from which we may expect a true method 
of education. Already the movement toward democratic con- 
trol of teaching is taking form in school systems and colleges. 
There are a hundred and fifty unions of teachers affiliated with 
the American Federation of Labour. But the true analogy is 
not between teachers and labour, but between education and 
other professions. To quote Dr. H. M. Kallen: 

" To the discoverers and creators of Knowledge, and to its 
transmitters and distributors, to these and to no one else be- 
side belongs the control of education. It is as absurd that any 
but teachers and investigators should govern the art of educa- 
tion as that any but medical practitioners and investigators 
should govern the art of medicine." 

The other thing needful to restore education to health and 
usefulness is that it should surrender its hold upon the su- 
perstitious adoration of the public, by giving up its preten- 
sions to individual or social salvation, by ceasing its flattery of 
nationalistic and capitalistic ambitions, and by laying aside 
its pomps and ceremonies which conduce mainly to sycophancy 
and cant. Education has shown in special lines that it can 
be thoroughly scientific, disinterested, devoted. It is its task 
to translate these virtues of the specialist into the general field. 
It is not the business of education to humbug the people in 



92 CIVILIZATION 

the interest of what any person may think to be for their or 
for his advantage. It is its business to deal frankly and hon- 
estly with them, accepting in the most literal sense the respon- 
sibility and the promise contained in the text: " Ye shall know 
the truth, and the truth shall make you free." 

Robert Morss Lovett 



SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM 

IT is natural for the musician to think any land barbarous 
if it has produced no great composers, the painter if it has 
produced no great painters, the critic or the scholar if it has 
produced no great scholars and critics, and so on for all the 
other arts and sciences. But it is idle to insist that every 
race should express itself in the same way, or to assume that 
the genius of a nation can be tested by its deficiencies in any 
single field of the higher life. Great critics are rare in every 
age and country; and even if they were not, what consolation 
is there for the clash and diversity of races and nations except 
the special and diverse gifts which each may furnish to the 
spiritual whole? England has achieved greatness without 
great music, Germany without great sculpture, ancient Rome 
without great science or philosophy, Judaea with little but 
poetry and religion; and it is not necessary to lay too much 
stress on our own lack of great scholars and great critics — 
yes, even on our lack of great poets and great painters. They 
may come to-day or to-morrow, or we may be destined never 
to have them. The idea that great national energy must in- 
evitably flower in a great literature, and that our wide-flung 
power must certainly find expression in an immortal poem or 
in the " great American novel," is merely another example of 
our mechanical optimism. The vision of great empires that 
have been both strong and silent, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, 
haunts all history; Virgil or Camoens only fitfully expresses 
the power that is summed up in Caesar or Magellan. 

But without insisting on impossible aims or illusory stand- 
ards of greatness, it is fair to ask some flow of spiritual activity, 
some general spirit of diffused culture, — in a word, the presence 
of a soul. For though we must eat (and common sense 
will cook better dinners than philosophy), though we must 
work (and the captain of industry can organize trade better 
than the poet), though we must play (and the athlete can win 
more games than the scholar), the civilization that has no 

93 



94 CIVILIZATION 

higher outlets for its intellect and imagination will show at 
least some marks of spiritual starvation. You may see the 
signs of its restless gnawing on the face of almost any Ameri- 
can woman beyond the first flush of youth; you may see some 
shadow of its hopeless craving on the face of almost any ma- 
ture American man. 

The same signs are to be seen in American scholarship and 
American criticism. If scholarship were what most people 
think it, the dull learning of pedants, and criticism merely the 
carping and bickering of fault-finders, the fact would hardly 
be worth recording. But since they are instruments which 
the mind of man uses for some of its keenest questionings, 
their absence or their weakness must indicate something at 
least in the national life and character which it is not unim- 
portant to understand. 



The tradition of scholarship, like so many other things, comes 
to us from what used to be called the Renaissance, the period 
(it may not be ironical to be reminded) in which the Americas 
were discovered and explored; and whatever savour of dis- 
tinction inheres in the idea of " the gentleman and the scholar " 
was created then. Scholarship at first meant merely a 
knowledge of the classics, and though it has since widened its 
scope, even then the diversity of its problems was apparent, for 
the classical writers had tilled many fields of human knowl- 
edge, and the student of Homer and Virgil was really faced 
with a different problem from the student of Plato or Thucy- 
dides. Scholarship has never been a reality, a field that could 
be bounded and defined in the sense in which poetry, philoso- 
phy, and history can be. It is a point of view, an attitude, 
a method of approach, and, so far as its meaning and purpose 
can be captured, it may be said to be the discipline and illumi- 
nation that come from the intellectual mastery of a definite 
problem involved in the growth of the human spirit. 

Scholarship, conceived in this sense, has no history (though 
dull and learned hodge-podges have served as such), for it is 
a spirit diffused over various fields of study; and in America 



SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM 95 

this spirit has scarcely even come into existence. American 
Universities seem to have been created for the special purpose 
of ignoring or destroying it. The chief monuments of Ameri- 
can scholarship have seldom if ever come from men who have 
been willing to live their whole lives in an academic atmosphere. 
The men whom we think of as our foremost literary scholars, 
Gildersleeve, Norton, and the rest, acquired their fame 
rather through their personalities than their scholarly achieve- 
ments. The historians, Motley, Prescott, Bancroft, Parkman, 
Rhodes, Lea, Fiske, Mahan, were not professors; books like 
Taylor's " Mediaeval Mind," Henry Adams's " Mont Saint 
Michel and Chartres," Thayer's " Cavour," Villard's " John 
Brown," and Beveridge's " John Marshall," even Ticknor's 
" History of Spanish Literature," were not written within Uni- 
versity walls, though Ticknor's sixteen years of teaching tamed 
the work of a brilliant man of the world until there is little 
left save the characteristic juiceless virtue of an intelligent or- 
dering of laborious research. It would seem as if in the at- 
mosphere of our Universities personality could not find fruitage 
in scholarly achievement worthy of it, and learning can only 
thrive when it gives no hostages to the enemy, personality. 

Of the typical products of this academic system, the lowest 
is perhaps the literary dissertation and the highest the histor- 
ical manual or text-book. It may be because history is not 
my own special field of study that I seem to find its practition- 
ers more vigorous intellectually than the literary scholars. 
Certainly our historians seem to have a special aptitude for 
compiling careful summaries of historical periods, and some of 
these have an ordered reasonableness and impersonal efficiency 
not unlike that of the financial accounting system of our large 
trusts or the budgets of our large universities. To me most of 
them seem feats of historical engineering rather than of his- 
torical scholarship; and if they represent a scholarly "ad- 
vance " on older and less accurate work, written before Clio 
became a peon of the professors, it can only be said that history 
has not yet recovered from the advance. Nor am I as much 
impressed as the historians themselves by the more recent clash 
between the " old " school and the " new," fowboth seem to me 
equally lacking in a truly philosophic conception of the mean- 



96 CIVILIZATION 

ing of history. Yet there is among the younger breed a certain 
freshness of mind and an openness to new ideas, though less to 
the problems of human personality or to the emotional and 
spiritual values of man's life. This deficiency is especially irri- 
tating in the field of biography. Not even an American opera 
(corruptio optimi) is as wooden as the biographies of our 
statesmen and national heroes; and if American lives written 
by Englishmen have been received with enthusiasm, it was less 
because of any inherent excellence than because they at least 
conceived of Hamilton or Lincoln as a man and not as an his- 
torical document or a political platitude. 

But literary scholarship is in far worse plight in our Uni- 
versities. No great work of classical learning has ever been 
achieved by an American scholar. It may be unfair to suggest 
comparison with men like Gilbert Murray, Croiset, or Wilamo- 
witz; but how can we be persuaded by the professors or even 
by a dean that all culture will die if we forget Greek and 
Latin, until they satisfy us by their own work that they them- 
selves are alive? Asia beckons to us with the hand of Fate, 
but Oriental scholarship is a desert through which a few 
nomadic professors wander aimlessly. As to the literatures in 
the modern European tongues, Dante scholarship has perhaps 
the oldest and most respectable tradition, but on examination 
dwindles into its proper proportions: an essay by Lowell and 
translations by Longfellow and Norton pointed the way; a 
Dante Society has nursed it; and its modern fruits, with one 
or two honourable exceptions, are a few unilluminating articles 
and text-books. Ticknor's pioneer work in the Spanish field 
has had no successors, though Spanish America is at our 
doors; the generous subsidies of rich men have resulted as 
usual in buildings but not in scholarship. Of the general level 
of our French and German studies I prefer to say nothing; 
and silence is also wisest in the case of English. This field 
fairly teems with professors; Harvard has twice as many as 
Oxford and Cambridge combined, and the University of Chi- 
cago almost as many as the whole of England. Whether this 
plethora of professors has justified itself, either by distin- 
guished works of scholarship or by helping young America to 
love literature and to write good English, I shall not decide, but 



SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM 97 

leave entirely to their own conscience. This at least may be 
said, that the mole is not allowed to burrow in his hole without 
disturbance; for in this atmosphere, as a protest and counter- 
foil, or as a token of submission to the idols of the market- 
place, there has arisen a very characteristic academic product, 
— the professor who writes popular articles, sometimes clever, 
sometimes precious, sometimes genteel and refined, sometimes 
merely commonplace, but almost always devoid of real knowl- 
edge or stimulating thought. Even the sober pedant is a more 
humane creature than the professorial smart-Aleck. 

Whence arises this inhibition of mediocrity, this fear of per- 
sonality and intellect, this deep antinomy of pedant and dilet- 
tante? The " fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease " which 
affected the professors of the Colleges of Unreason in " Ere- 
whon " is mildly endemic in every University in the world, and 
to a certain degree in every profession; but nowhere else does it 
give the tone to the intellectual life of a whole people. If I 
were a sociologist, confident that the proper search would un- 
earth an external cause for every spiritual defect, I might 
point to any one of a dozen or more damning facts as the origin 
and source of all our trouble, — to the materialism of a national 
life directed solely toward practical ends, to the levelling and. 
standardizing influences of democracy, to Anglo-Saxon " Co- 
lonialism," to the influence of German scholarship, or to the 
inadequate economic rewards of the academic life. I should 
probably make much of that favourite theme of critical fantasy, 
the habits derived from the " age of the pioneers," a period in 
which life, with its mere physical discomforts and its mere 
demands on physical energy and endurance, was really so easy 
and simple that Americans attempt to reproduce it on all their 
holidays. 

But in so far as they have any reality, all these are merely 
symptoms of the same disease of the soul. The modern sana- 
torium may be likened to the mediaeval monastery without its 
spiritual faith ; the American University to a University without 
its inner illumination. It is an intellectual refuge without the 
integration of a central soul, — crassly material because it has 
no inner standards to redeem it from the idols of the market- 
place, or timid and anaemic because it lacks that quixotic fire 



9g CIVILIZATION 

which inheres in every act of faith. It is at one and the same 
time our greatest practical achievement and our greatest 
spiritual failure. To call it a compound of sanatorium and 
machine-shop may seem grossly unfair to an institution which 
has more than its share of earnest and high-minded men; but 
though the phrase may not describe the reality, it does indicate 
the danger. When we find that in such a place education does 
not educate, we cry for help to the only gods we know, the 
restless gods of Administration and Organization; but scholar- 
ship cannot be organized or administered into existence, even 
by Americans. 

What can we say (though it seem to evade the question) 
save that America has no scholarship because as yet it has a 
body but no soul? The scholar goes through all the proper 
motions, — collects facts, organizes research, delivers lectures, 
writes articles and sometimes books, — but under this outer 
seeming there is no inner reality. Under all the great works 
of culture there broods the quivering soul of tradition, a bur- 
den sometimes disturbing and heavy to bear, but more often 
helping the soul to soar on wings not of its own making. We 
think hungrily that the freshness of outlook of a young people 
should be more than compensation; but the freshness is not 
there. Bad habits long persisted in, or new vices painfully 
acquired, may pass for traditions among some spokesmen of 
" Americanism," but will not breathe the breath of life into 
a national culture. All is shell, mask, and a deep inner empti- 
ness. We have scholars without scholarship, as there are 
churches without religion. 

Until there comes a change of heart or a new faith or a deep 
inner searching, scholarship must continue to live this thwarted 
and frustrated life. Only a profound realization of its high 
purpose and special function, and the pride that comes from 
this realization, can give the scholar his true place in an 
American world. For this special function is none other than 
to act as the devoted servant of thought and imagination and 
to champion their claims as the twin pillars that support all 
the spiritual activities of human life, — art, philosophy, religion, 
science; and these it must champion against all the materialists 
under whatever name they disguise their purpose. What 



SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM 99 

matter whether they be scientists who decry " dialectics," or 
sociologists who sneer at '' mere belles-lettres," or practical 
men who have no use for the "higher life"? Whether 
they be called bourgeois or radical, conservative or intellectual, 
— all who would reduce life to a problem of practical activity 
and physical satisfaction, all who would reduce intellect and 
imagination to mere instruments of practical usefulness, all 
who worship dead idols instead of living gods, all who grasp at 
every flitting will-o'-the-wisp of theory or sensation, — all these 
alike scholarship must forever recognize as its enemies and its 
chief tempters. 



n 

Scholarship, so conceived, is the basis of criticism. When a 
few years ago I pubhshed a volume which bore the subtitle of 
" Essays on the Unity of Genius and Taste," the pedants and 
the professors were in the ascendant, and it seemed necessary 
to emphasize the side of criticism which was then in danger, 
the side that is closest to the art of the creator. But the pro- 
fessors have been temporarily routed by the dilettanti, the 
amateurs, and the journalists, who treat a work of the imagi- 
nation as if they were describing fireworks or a bull-fight (to 
use a phrase of Zola's about Gautier) ; and so it is necessary 
now to insist on the discipline and illumination of scholarship, 
—in other words, to write an " Essay on the Divergence of 
Criticism and Creation." 

American criticism, like that of England, but to an even 
greater extent, suffers from a want of philosophic insight 
and precision. It has neither inherited nor created a tradition 
of aesthetic thought. For it every critical problem is a sepa- 
rate problem, a problem in a philosophic vacuum, and so open 
for discussion to any astute mind with a taste for letters. 
Realism, classicism, romanticism, imagism, impressionism, ex- 
pressionism, and other terms or movements as they spring up, 
seem ultimate realities instead of matters of very subordinate 
concern to any philosophy of art, — mere practical programmes 
which bear somewhat the same relation to aesthetic truth that 
the platform of the Republican Party bears to Aristotle's " Poli- 



100 CIVILIZATION 

tics " or Marx's " Capital." As a result, critics are constantly 
carrying on a guerilla warfare of their own in favour of some 
vague literary shibboleth or sociological abstraction, and dis- 
covering anew the virtues or vices of individuality, modernity, 
Puritanism, the romantic spirit or the spirit of the Middle 
West, the traditions of the pioneer, and so on ad infinitum. 
This holds true of every school of American criticism, " con- 
servative " or " radical "; for all of them a disconnected body 
of literary theories takes the place of a real philosophy of art. 
" Find an idea and then write about it " sums up the American 
conception of criticism. Now, while the critic must approach 
a work of literature without preconceived notion of what that 
individual work should attempt, he cannot criticize it without 
some understanding of what all literature attempts. The critic 
without an aesthetic is a mariner without chart, compass, or 
knowledge of navigation; for the question is not where the 
ship should go or what cargo it should carry, but whether it is 
going to arrive at any port at all without sinking. 

Criticism is essentially an expression of taste, or that faculty 
of imaginative sympathy by which the reader or spectator is 
able to re-live the vision created by the artist. This is the soil 
without which it cannot flourish; but it attains its end and 
becomes criticism in the highest sense only when taste is guided 
by knowledge and thought. Of these three elements, implicit 
in all real criticism, the professors have made light of taste, 
and have made thought itself subservient to knowledge, while 
the dilettanti have considered it possible to dispense with both 
knowledge and thought. But even dilettante criticism is pref- 
erable to the dogmatic and intellectualist criticism of the pro- 
fessors, on the same grounds that Sainte-Beuve is superior to 
Brunetiere, or Hazlitt to Francis Jeffrey; for the dilettante at 
least meets the mind of the artist on the plane of imagination 
and taste, while the intellectualist or moralist is precluded by 
his temperament and his theories from ever understanding the 
primal thrill and purpose of the creative act. 

Back of any philosophy of art there must be a philosophy 
of life, and all aesthetic formulae seem empty unless there is 
richness of content behind them. The critic, like the poet or 
the philosopher, has the whole world to range in, and the far- 



SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM loi 

ther he ranges in it, the better his work will be. Yet this does 
not mean that criticism should focus its attention on morals, 
history, life, instead of on the forms into which the artist trans- 
forms them. Art has something else to give us; and to seek 
morals, or economic theories, or the national spirit in it is to 
seek morals, economic theories, the national spirit, but not 
art. Indeed, the United States is the only civilized country 
where morals are still in controversy so far as creative litera- 
ture is concerned; France, Germany, and Italy liberated them- 
selves from this faded obsession long ago; even in England 
critics of authority hesitate to judge a work of art by moral 
standards. Yet this is precisely what divides the two chief 
schools of American criticism, the moralists and the anti-mor- 
alists, though even among the latter masquerade some whose 
only quarrel with the moralists is the nature of the moral stand- 
ards employed. 

Disregarding the Coleridgean tradition, which seems to have 
come to an end with Mr. Woodberry, and the influence of the 
" new psychology," which has not yet taken a definite form, the 
main forces that have influenced the present clashes in the 
American attitude toward literature seem to be three. There 
is first of all the conception of literature as a moral influence, 
a conception which goes back to the Graeco-Roman rhetoric- 
ians and moralists, and after pervading English thought from 
Sidney to Matthew Arnold, finds its last stronghold to-day 
among the American descendants of the Puritans. There is, 
secondly, the Shavian conception of literature as the most effec- 
tive vehicle for a new Weltanschauung, to be judged by the 
novelty and freshness of its ideas, a conception particularly 
attractive to the school of young reformers, radicals, and in- 
tellectuals whose interest in the creative imagination is sec- 
ondary, and whose training in aesthetic thought has been neg- 
ligible; this is merely an obverse of the Puritan moralism, and 
is tainted by the same fundamental misconception of the mean- 
ing of the creative imagination. And there is finally the con- 
ception of literature as an external thing, a complex of rhythms, 
charm, beauty without inner content, or mere theatrical effec- 
tiveness, which goes back through the English 'nineties to the 
French 'seventies, when the idea of the independence of art 



102 CIVILIZATION 

from moral and intellectual standards was distorted into the 
merely mechanical theory of " art for art's sake "; the French 
have a special talent for narrowing aesthetic truths into hard- 
and-fast formulae, devoid of their original nucleus of philoso- 
phic reality, but all the more effective on this account for uni- 
versal conquest as practical programmes. 

The apparent paradox which none of these critics face is 
that the Weltanschauung of the creative artist, his moral con- 
victions, his views on intellectual, economic, and other subjects, 
furnish the content of his work and are at the same time the 
chief obstacles to his artistic achievement. Out of morals or 
philosophy he has to make, not morals or philosophy, but 
poetry; for morals and philosophy are only a part, and a small 
part, of the whole reality which his imagination has to en- 
compass. The man who is overwhelmed with moral theories 
and convictions would naturally find it easiest to become a 
moralist, and moralists are prosaic, not poetic. A man who 
has strong economic convictions would find it easiest to be- 
come an economist or economic reformer, and economics too 
is the prose of life, not the poetry. A man with a strong phi- 
losophic bias would find it easiest to become a pure thinker, 
and the poet's visionary world topples when laid open to the 
cold scrutiny of logic. A poet is a human being, and there- 
fore likely to have convictions, prejudices, preconceptions, like 
other men; but the deeper his interest in them is, the easier 
it is for him to become a moralist, economist, philosopher, or 
what not, and the harder for him to transcend them and to be- 
come a poet. But if the genius of the poet (and by poet I 
mean any writer of imaginative literature) is strong enough, 
it will transcend them, pass over them by the power of the 
imagination, which leaves them behind without knowing it. 
It has been well said that morals are one reality, a poem is an- 
other reality, and the illusion consists in thinking them one 
and the same. The poet's conscience as a man may be satis- 
fied by the illusion, but woe to him if it is not an illusion, for 
that is what we tell him when we say, " He is a moralist, not 
a poet." Such a man has really expressed his moral convic- 
tions, instead of leaping over and beyond them into that world 
of the imagination where moral ideas must be interpreted from 



SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM 103 

the standpoint of poetry, or the artistic needs of the characters 
portrayed, and not by the logical or reality value of morals. 
This " leaping over " is the test of all art; it is inherent in 
the very nature of the creative imagination. It explains, for 
example, how Milton the moralist started out to make Satan 
a demon and how Milton the poet ended by making him a hero. 
It explains the blindness of the American critic who recently 
objected to the " loose thinking " of a poem of Carl Sandburg 
in which steel is conceived of as made of smoke and blood, and 
who propounded this question to the Walrus and the Carpenter: 
" How can smoke, the lighter refuse of steel, be one of its 
constituents, and how can the smoke which drifts away from 
the chimney and the blood which flows in the steelmaker's veins 
be correlates in their relation to steel? " Where shall we match 
this precious gem? Over two centuries ago, Othello's cry after 
the death of Desdemona, 

" heavy hour, 
Methinks it should now be a huge eclipse 
Of sun and moon! " 

provoked another intellectualist critic to enquire whether " the 
sun and moon can both together be so hugely eclipsed in any 
one heavy hour whatsoever; " but Rymer has been called " the 
worst critic that ever lived " for applying tests like these to the 
poetry of Shakespeare. Over a century ago a certain Abbe 
Morellet, unmoved by the music of Chateaubriand's description 
of the moon, — 

" She pours forth in the wooas this great secret of melancholy 
which she loves to recount to the old oaks and the ancient shores 
of the sea," — 

asked his readers: " How can the melancholy of night be called 
a secret; and if the moon recounts it, how is it still a secret; 
and how does she manage to recount it to the old oaks and the 
ancient shores of the sea rather than to the deep valleys, the 
mountains, and the rivers? " 

These are simply exaggerations of the inevitable consequence 
of carrying over the mood of actual life into the world of the 



104 CIVILIZATION 

imagination. " Sense, sense, nothing but sense! " cried a great 
Austrian poet, " as if poetry in contrast with prose were not 
always a kind of divine nonsense. Every poetic image bears 
within itself its own certain demonstration that logic is not the 
arbitress of art." And Alfieri spoke for every poet in the world 
when he said of himself, " Reasoning and judging are for me 
only pure and generous forms of feeling." The trained 
economist, philosopher, or moralist, examining the ideas of a 
poet, is always likely to say: " These are not clearly thought 
out or logical ideas; they are just a poet's fancy or inspira- 
tion; " and that is the final praise of the poet. If the expert 
finds a closely reasoned treatise we may be sure that we shall 
find no poetry. It is a vision of reality, and not reality, imagi- 
nation and not thought or morals, that the artist gives us; and 
his spiritual world, with all that it means for the soaring life 
of man, fades and disappears when we bring to it no other test 
than the test of reality. 

These are some of the elementary reasons why those who 
demand of the poet a definite code of morals or manners — 
" American ideals," or " Puritanism," or on the other side, 
" radical ideas " — seem to me to show their incompetence as 
critics. How can we expect illumination from those who share 
the " typical American business man's " inherent inability to 
live in the world of fantasy which the poets have created, with- 
out the business man's ability to face the external facts of life 
and mould them to his will? These men are schoolmasters, 
pedants, moralists, policemen, but neither critics nor true lovers 
of the spiritual food that art provides. To the creative writers 
of America I should give a wholly different message from theirs. 
I should say to them: " Express what is in you, all that serene 
or turbulent vision of multitudinous life which is yours by right 
of imagination, trusting in your own power to achieve discipline 
and mastery, and leave the discussion of ' American ideals ' 
to statesmen, historians, and philosophers, with the certainty 
that if you truly express the vision that is in you, the states- 
men, historians, and philosophers of the future* will point to 
your work as a fine expression of the ' American ideals ' you 
have helped to create." 

But it is no part of the critic's duty to lay down laws for 



SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM 105 

the guidance of the creator, though he may have insight enough 
to foresee some of the directions which Hterature is likely to 
take. He may even point out new material for the imagina- 
tion of poets to feed on, — the beautiful folklore of our native 
Indians, the unplumbed depths of the Negro's soul, the poetry 
and wisdom of Asia (which it may be our chief destiny to in- 
terpret for the nations of Europe), the myth and story of the 
hundred races that are to make up the new America, and all 
the undiscovered coigns and crannies of our national life. I 
shall not say that these services are extraneous and unimpor- 
tant, like furnishing the fountain-pen with which a great poem 
is written; but incursions into the geography of the imag- 
ination are incidental to the critic's main duty of interpreting 
literature and making its meaning and purpose clear to all who 
wish to love and understand it. 

The first need of American criticism to-day is education in 
aesthetic thinking. It needs above all the cleansing and stimu- 
lating power of an intellectual bath. Only the drenching disci- 
pline that conies from intellectual mastery of the problems of 
aesthetic thought can train us for the duty of interpreting the 
American literature of the future. The anarchy of impres- 
sionism is a natural reaction against the mechanical theories 
and jejune text-books of the professors, but it is a temporary 
haven and not a home. The haphazard empiricism of English 
criticism and the faded moralism of our own will serve us no 
more. We must desert these muddy waters, and seek purer 
and deeper streams. In a country where philosophers urge men 
to cease thinking, it may be the task of the critic to revivify 
and reorganize thought. Only in this way can we gain what 
America lacks, the brain-illumined soul. 

The second need of American criticism can be summed up 
in the word scholarship — that discipline of knowledge which 
will give us at one and the same time a wider international out- 
look and a deeper national insight. One will spring from the 
other, for the timid Colonial spirit finds no place in the heart 
of the citizen of the world; and respect for native talent, born 
of a surer knowledge, will prevent us alike from overrating its 
merits and from holding it too cheap. Half-knowledge is either 
too timid or too cocksure; and only out of this spiritual 



io6 CIVILIZATION 

discipline can come a true independence or judgment and 
taste. 

For taste is after all both the point of departure and the 
goal; and the third and greatest need of American criticism 
is a deeper sensibility, a more complete submission to the 
imaginative will of the artist, before attempting to rise above 
it into the realm of judgment. If there is anything that Amer- 
ican life can be said to give least of all, it is training in taste. 
There is a deadness of artistic feeling, which is sometimes re- 
placed or disguised by a fervour of sociological obsession, but 
this is no substitute for the faculty of imaginative sympathy 
which is at the heart of all criticism. When the social historian 
is born, the critic dies; for taste, or aesthetic enjoyment, is the 
only gateway to the critic's judgment, and over it is a flaming 
signpost, " Critic, abandon all hope when this gate is shut." 

" To ravish Beauty with dividing powers 
Is to let exquisite essences escape." 

Only out of the fusion of these three elements of taste, intellect, 
and knowledge can American criticism gain what in one of its 
manifestations is called " personality " and in another " style." 
Only in this way can it win in the battle against the benumbing 
chaos and the benumbing monotony of American art and life. 

We are all cocksure but bewildered children in a world we 
cannot understand. We are all parvenus — parvenus on a new 
continent, on the fringes of which some have lived a little 
longer than others, but the whole of which has been encom- 
passed by none of us for more than two or three generations; 
parvenus in a new world of steam and electricity, wireless and 
aeroplane machinery and industry, which none of us has yet 
been able to subdue to a mould that satisfies our deepest crav- 
ings; parvenus in our culture, which still seems like a borrowed 
garment instead of flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. 
What is the good of all the instruments that our hands have 
moulded if we have neither the will nor the imagination to 
wield them for the uses of the soul? Not in this fashion shall 
we justify our old dream of an America that is the hope of the 
world. Here are hundreds of colleges and universities; why 



SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM 107 

not fill these empty barracks with scholars and thinkers? Here 
are a hundred races; why not say to them: " America can give 
you generous opportunity and the most superb instruments that 
the undisciplined energy of practical life has ever created, but 
in the spiritual fields of art, poetry, religion, culture, it has little 
or nothing to give you; let us all work together, learning and 
creating these high things side by side "? Here are more hearts 
empty and unfulfilled and more restless minds than the world 
has ever before gathered together; why not lead them out of 
their corrals, and find a fitting pasture for their brains and 
souls? 

J. E. Spingarn 



GLOSSARY 

The English language, extraordinarily rich and expressive in 
everything that concerns the practical or the imaginative life, suffers 
from the poverty and lack of precision of English aesthetic thought. 
It may therefore be useful to indicate briefly the special sense in 
which certain terms are used in this essay, 

" Spectator: I should say that you have advanced a subtlety that is 
little more than a play on words. 

"Friend: And I maintain that when we are speaking of the operations 
of the soul, no words can be delicate and subtle enough." — Goethe. 

Art — Any creation of the imagination, whether in the form of 
imiEginative literature or of painting, sculpture, music, etc. 

Artist — The creator of a work of art in any of its forms; not used 
in this essay in the narrower sense of painter or sculptor. 

Poetry — All literature in which reality has been transfigured by the 
imagination, including poetry in its narrower sense, the novel, 
the drama, etc.; used instead of "imaginative literaure," not 
merely for the sake of brevity, but as implying a special em- 
phasis on creative power. 

Poet — A writer of imaginative literature in any of its forms; not 
used in this essay in the narrower sense of a writer of verse. 

Taste — The faculty of imaginative sympathy by which the reader 
or spectator is able to re-live the vision of the artist, and there- 
fore the essential pre-requisite to all criticism. 

Criticism — Any expression of taste guided by knowledge and 



io8 CIVILIZATION 

thought. (The critic's training in knowledge is scholarship, and 
his special field of thought aesthetics.) 

Esthetics — An ordered and reasoned conception of the meaning 
and purpose of art, intended for the guidance of the critic and 
not of the artist. 

A Literary Theory — An isolated " idea " or theory in regard to 
imaginative literature, without reference to any ordered and 
reasoned conception of its meaning and purpose. 

Impressionist Criticism — Any expression of taste without adequate 
guidance of knowledge or thought. 

Intellectualist {or dogmatic) criticism — Criticism based on the con- 
ception that art is a product of thought rather than of imagina- 
tion, and that the creative fantasy of the artist can be limited 
and judged by the critic's pre-conceived theories; or in the more 
ornate words of Francis Thompson, criticism that is " for ever 
shearing the wild tresses of poetry between rusty rules." 

The Intellectuals — All who lay undue stress on the place of intellect 
in life, and assume that the turbulent flux of reality can be tied 
up in neat parcels of intellectual formulae. 

Learning — The accumulation of certain forms of knowledge as a 
basis for scholarship, but no more the main purpose of scholar- 
ship than his preparatory training is the sole object of the 
athlete or soldier. 

Scholarship — The discipline and illumination that come from the 
intellectual mastery of a definite problem in the spiritual (as 
opposed to the practical) life of man. 

Pedant — Any one who thinks that learning is the whole of scholar- 
ship. 

J. E. S. 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE 

SHOULD we ever entertain an intelligent explorer from 
Mars, we should of course importune him, in season and 
out, for his impressions of America. And if he were candid 
as well as intelligent, he might ultimately be interviewed some- 
what as follows: 

" At first I thought the most striking fact about you was 
your passion for education. While I have been enjoying your 
so thorough hospitality I have met a minority of Americans 
who express themselves less complacently than the rest about 
your material blessings; I have talked with a few dissidents 
from your political theory; and I have even heard complaints 
that it is possible to carry moral enthusiasm too far. But I 
have yet to meet that American who is sceptical about educa- 
tion as such, though on the other hand I have found few of 
your citizens quite content with the working of every part of 
your educational establishment. And this very discontent 
was what clinched my first impression that schooling is the 
most vital of your passionate interests. 

" Yet as I have travelled from one to another of your cities, 
a second fact about you has struck me so forcibly as to contest 
the supremacy of the first. You Americans more and more 
seem to me to be essentially alike. Your cities are only less 
identical than the trains that ply between them. Nearly any 
congregation could worship just as comfortably in nearly any 
other church. The casts of almost any two plays, the staffs 
of almost any two newspapers, even the faculties of almost any 
two colleges could exchange ' vehicles ' with about the same 
results that would attend their exchanging clothes. 

" And in nothing are you so alike as in your universal desire 
to be alike — to be inconspicuous, to put on straw hats on the 
same day, to change your clothes in Texas in accordance with 
the seasons in New York, to read the books everybody else is 
reading, to adopt the opinions a weekly digests for you from 

109 



no CIVILIZATION 

the almost uniform opinions of the whole of the daily press, 
in war and peace to be incontestably and entirely American. 

" Now, I should scarcely make bold to be so frank about 
these observations if some of my new friends had not reassured 
me with the information that they are not novel, that a dis- 
tinguished Englishman has put them into what you have con- 
sidered the most representative and have made the most popu- 
lar book about your commonwealth, that in fact you rather 
enjoy having outsiders recognize the success of your efforts in 
uniformity. There is, of course, no reason why you should not 
be as similar to each other as you choose, and you must not 
interpret my surprise to mean that I am shocked by anything 
except the contradiction I find between this essential similarity 
and what I have called your passion for education. 

" On Mars it has for a long time been our idea that the 
function of the school is to put our youth in touch with what all 
sorts of Martians have thought and are thinking, have felt and 
are feeling. I say ' put in touch ' rather than ' teach,' because 
it is not so much our notion to pack their minds and hearts as 
to proffer samples of our various cultures and supply keys to 
the storehouses — not unlike your libraries, museums, and labo- 
ratories — that contain our records. We prefer to think of 
schooling as a kind of thoroughfare between our past and our 
present, an avenue to the recovery and appreciation of as many 
as possible of those innumerable differences between Martian 
and Martian, those conflicting speculations and cogitations, 
myths and hypotheses regarding our planet and ourselves that 
have gone into the warp and woof of our mental history. 
Thus we have hoped not only to preserve and add to the body 
of Martian knowledge, but also to understand better and utilize 
more variously our present minds. So it seems to us perfectly 
natural, and has rather pleased than distressed us, that our 
students should emerge from their studies with a multitude 
of differing sympathies, beliefs, tastes, and ambitions. We 
have thought that such an education enriched the lives of all 
of us, lives that ignorance could not fail to constrict and sub- 
ject to hum-drum monotony. 

" So when I return to Mars and report that I found Earth's 
most favourable continent inhabited by its most literate great 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE iii 

people, a people that has carried the use of print and other 
means of communication to a point we Martians have never 
dared dream about; that this people has at once the most 
widely diffused enthusiasm for education and the most compre- 
hensive school equipment on Earth; and finally that this people 
is at the same time the most uniform in its life — well, I fear 
I shall not be believed." 

On subsequent visits the Martian might, as a wise man does 
who is confronted by a logical impasse, re-examine the terms 
of his paradox. 

As regards our uniformity, fresh evidence could only endorse 
his first impressions. The vestigial remnants of what regional 
cultures we have had are rapidly being effaced by our un- 
thinking standardization in every department of life. The 
railroad, the telephone and telegraph, the newspaper, the Ford, 
the movies, advertising — all have scarcely standardized them- 
selves before they have set about standardizing everything 
within their reach. Not even our provinces of the picturesque 
are immune, the places and things we like to think of as " dif- 
ferent " (word that betrays our standard sameness! ) and glam- 
orous of our romantic golden age. In the Old South, Birming- 
ham loves to call herself the Pittsburgh of the South; our rail- 
roads have all but hounded the packets from the Mississippi; 
it is notorious that our apostles to the Indians, whether po- 
litical, religious, or pedagogic, wage relentless war on the very 
customs and traditions we cherish in legend; the beautiful Mis- 
sions that a kindlier evangelism bequeathed to them are re- 
peated and cheapened in every suburb and village of the land, 
under every harsher sky; those once spontaneous fetes of the 
plains, the " Stampede " and the " Round-Up," have been made 
so spurious that the natives abandon them for a moth-eaten 
Wild West Show made in the East; and in only a year or two 
even New Orleans' Mardi Gras will be indistinguishable from 
its counterfeits in St, Louis and elsewhere. 

As with these adventitious and perhaps not very important 
regional differentiations, so with the one fundamental demarca- 
tion our people have all along recognized as conditioning the 
give-and-take of American life. The line between the East 
and the West, advancing from the Alleghanies to the Rockies 



112 CIVILIZATION 

and then part of the way back, has never stayed long enough 
in one zone to be precisely drawn, but it has always been 
sharply felt. Since Colonial times the East has meant many 
things — wealth, stability, contacts with Europe, refinement, in- 
dustry, centralized finance — and the West has meant many 
things — hardship and adventure, El Dorado, outlawry, self- 
reliance, agriculture, vast enterprise; but they have never been 
so close to meaning the same things as to-day. To-morrow 
they will merge. Even now the geographical line between 
them may be drawn anywhere in a belt two thousand miles 
wide, in which it will be fixed according to the nativity of the 
critic rather than by any pronounced social stigmata. East or 
West, there is a greater gulf between the intelligent and the 
unintelligent of the same parish than divides the intelligent 
of different parishes. East or West, Americans think pretty 
much the same thoughts, feel about the same emotions^, and 
express themselves in the American tongue — that is, in slang. 
If the slang, the accent, the manner differ noticeably, as they 
still do, there are not wanting signs that another generation will 
obliterate these differences too. Publishing, to be sure, tends 
to concentrate in the East, though without impoverishing the 
West, since all notable circulations have to be national to sur- 
vive. The very fact that the country's publishing can be done 
from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston demonstrates our 
national unanimity of opinion and expression. 

Before it overleapt the geographical walls, this national 
unanimity had wiped out every class distinction but one, which 
it has steadily tended to entrench — the money line. Families 
may continue to hold their place only on the condition that 
they keep their money or get more; and a moderate fortune, 
no matter how quickly come by, has only to make a few correct 
strokes, avoid a few obvious bunkers, and it will found a fam- 
ily by inadvertence. The process is so simple that clerks 
practise it during their vacations at the shore. 

Besides money, there is one other qualification — personal 
charm. Its chief function, perhaps, is to disguise the essen- 
tially monetary character of American social life. At any 
rate, Americans are almost as uniformly charming as they are 
uniformly acquisitive. For the most part it is a negative 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE 113 

charm, a careful skirting of certain national taboos: it eschews 
frank egoism, unfavourable criticism, intellectual subtlety, 
unique expressions of temperament, humour that is no re- 
specter of persons, anything that might disturb the status quo 
of reciprocal kindliness and complacent optimism. The un- 
popular American is unpopular not because he is a duffer or 
a bore, but because he is " conceited," a " knocker," a " high- 
brow," a " nut," a " grouch," or something of that ilk. We 
do not choose, as the Martian suggested, to be as similar 
as possible; we choose not to be dissimilar. If our convictions 
about America and what is American sprang from real knowl- 
edge of ourselves and of our capacities, we should relish egoists, 
disinterested critics, intellectuals, artists, and irreverent 
humourists, instead of suppressing them when we cannot 
mould them. That we do not relish them, that we protect 
ourselves from them, is evidence that we fear them. What 
reason should we have to fear them save a secret distrust of 
our asseverated convictions? Our unanimity, then, would seem 
to the Martian to be an artificial substitute for some natural 
background we lack but should like to have; and a most dan- 
gerous wish-fulfilment it is, for it masks our ignorance of what 
we are and what we may reasonably become. Far from be- 
ing self-knowledge, Americanism would seem to him to be a 
hallucination, an article of faith supported only by our deter- 
mination to believe it, and to coerce others into believing it. 
The secret of our uniformity would be a stubborn ignorance. 

At which point our critic would have to re-examine his 
earlier impressions about our " passion for education," and 
strive to understand the uses to which we actually put our 
educational establishment, to appraise its function in our life. 

Beginning with the kindergarten, it provides us a few hours' 
relief from our responsibility toward our youngsters. Curi- 
ously, the Americans most given to this evasion are the Ameri- 
cans most inveterately sentimental about the " kiddies " and 
most loath to employ the nursery system, holding it somehow 
an undemocratic invasion of the child's rights. Then some- 
where in the primary grades we begin to feel that we are pur- 
chasing relief from the burden of fundamental instruction. 
Ourselves mentally lazy, abstracted, and genuinely bewildered 



114 CIVILIZATION 

by the flow of questions from only one mouth, we bhthely refer 
that awakening curiosity to a harassed young woman, probably 
less well informed than we are, who has to answer, or silence, 
the questions of from a score to three score mouths. So be- 
gins that long throttling of curiosity which later on will baffle 
the college instructor, who will sometimes write a clever maga- 
zine essay about the complacent ignorance of his pupils. 

A few years, and our expectation has shifted to the main 
chance. We begin worrying over grade reports and knotting 
our brows over problems in arithmetic by way of assisting our 
offspring to the practical advantages of education. For the 
child, we now demand of his teachers solid and lasting prepa- 
ration in the things whose monetary value our office or do- 
mestic payroll keeps sharply before us — figures, penmanship, 
spelling, home economics. For us, the vicarious glory of his 
" brightness." But we want this brightness to count, to be in 
the direct avenue to his career; so we reinforce the environment 
that gently discourages him from the primrose paths of knowl- 
edge. Nothing " practical " is too good for the boy at this mo- 
ment — tool chests, bicycles, wireless, what not. Thank God, 
we can give him a better start than we had. As for arts and 
letters, well, we guess what was good enough for his dad is good 
enough for him. Meanwhile we are rather pleased than not at 
the athletics and the other activities in which the grammar 
school apes the high school that apes the college. 

The long spiral of repetitive schooling in study and sport 
has now commenced its climb: year by year reviews and adds 
its fresh increment to last year's subject-matter in the classroom 
and on the field. Is it so strange that when the boy meets his 
college professors he is cock-sure of knowing to a hair the limits 
of what is normal and important in life, beyond which lie the 
abnormal interests of the grinds? That mediocre C is a gen- 
tleman's mark? Not his to question the system that, in season 
and out, has borne down on passing instead of on training, and 
that ends somewhere, soon or late, with a diploma and, amid 
family plaudits, graduation from family control. 

The high schools are expected to fit ninety-five per cent, of 
their charges for life and five per cent, for college. If our boy 
and girl are of the ninety and five, we demand very early spe- 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE 115 

cialization toward their precious careers, wax enthusiastic over 
the school's model mercantile and banking establishment, ex- 
pand to know our children are being dosed with a course in 
" Civics," generously admire the history note-books in which 
they have spread much tinted ink over a little stereo- 
typed information, and in what we fool ourselves into believing 
are the margins to all these matters proudly watch them cap- 
ture a class numeral or a school letter, grumblingly pay for 
real estate signs that have gone up in flame to celebrate some 
epochal victory, and bear with their antics during hazings and 
initiations. It's a democratic country^ and if the poor man's 
son cannot go to college, why the college must come to him. 
Nor are we without a certain undemocratic satisfaction in the 
thought that he has stolen a four years' march into business 
over the rich man's son, who spends his college hours, we 
assure ourselves, acquiring habits that will leave him weak in 
the hour of competition. 

Meanwhile the straddling masters are cramming the other 
five with all the dates and rules and verbs and prose passages 
which long and bitter experience has demonstrated to be like- 
liest on entrance examinations. From the classrooms, as term 
follows term with its endless iteration of short advances and 
long reviews, there rises the bruit of rivalry: masters decorously 
put forward the claims of their own colleges; pupils rejoice 
when their future alma mater notches another athletic victory 
to the well-remembered tally; the weak of heart are urging 
upon their bewildered parents the superior merits of the 
" back-door " route to some exacting university — by certificate 
to a small college and transfer at the end of the first year. 

There are high schools in whose cases all this is under- 
statement; and of course there are innumerable others, espe- 
cially in these days when the most rigorous colleges have lost 
a little of their faith in entrance examinations, where it is 
absurd overstatement. Nevertheless your son, if he goes to 
a representative Eastern college from a representative high 
school, goes as a man steals second in the seventh. And his 
subsequent instructors marvel at the airy nonchalance with 
which he ignores " the finer things of life "! 

The private secondary schools, save those that are frankly 



ii6 CIVILIZATION 

designed to relieve parents of recalcitrant boys when the pub- 
lic schools will have no more of them, are pretty much without 
the ninety-five per cent, of non-college men. Frequently they 
have their charges for longer periods. So they are free to 
specialize in cramming with more singleness of mind and at 
the same time to soften the process as their endowments and 
atmospheres permit. But at bottom the demand you make of 
the " prep school " is the same demand your bookkeeper puts 
on his son's high school: you want your boy launched into col- 
lege with the minimum of trouble for yourself and the maximum 
of practical advantage for him ; your bookkeeper wants his boy 
launched into business with a minimum of frippery and a 
maximum of marketable skill. One boy is experted into col- 
lege, the other is experted into business. You are both among 
those passionate believers in education who impressed the Mar- 
tian on his first visit. 

Some educator has announced that the college course should 
not only provide preparation for life but should itself be a sat- 
isfactory portion of life. What college student so dull as not 
to know that? For the most part, he trusts the faculty to 
provide the preparation — sometimes it would seem that he 
dares it to — but he takes jolly good care that the four years 
shall give him life more abundantly. He has looked forward 
to them with an impatience not even the indignity of entrance 
examinations could balk; he will live them to the top of his 
bent; and he will look back on them tenderly, even sentimen- 
tally, as the purplest patch of his days. So the American un- 
dergraduate is representative of the American temper at its 
best. He is the flower of our youth at its moment of perfect 
bloom, its ideals not yet corrupted, its aspirations unwithered. 
As he thinks and feels, all America would think and feel if it 
dared and could. 

At this point, therefore, the Martian's inquiry into what we 
expect from our educational establishment would have to shift 
its point of view from the older to the younger generation. 
The Martian would be much in demand at our colleges, both 
as a sure-fire lecturer and as a shining target for degrees certain 
to attract wide publicity to the donors. Let us imagine him 
setting aside a page in his notebook for a scheme of under- 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE 117 

graduate emphases, grouped and amended as his triumphant 
progress permitted him to check up on his observations. 

Athletics would of course head the list. Regarded as play — 
that is, as they affect the spectator — college sports proffer a 
series of thrilling Roman holidays extending from the first week 
or so of term-time to the final base-ball game and crew race 
of Commencement week the next June, and for some colleges 
there may be transatlantic sequels in midsummer or later. It 
is by no means all play for the spectator, whose loyalty to his 
institution makes it his duty to watch the teams practise, fol- 
low the histories of the gladiators who are at once his repre- 
sentatives and his entertainers, and drill himself in songs and 
yells at noisy mass meetings; to bet on his college according 
to his purse and without any niggardly regard for his sober 
judgment as to the event; then to deck himself in the colours, 
march to the field, and watch the fray from the cheering sec- 
tion, where his attention will be perpetually interrupted by the 
orders and the abuse of a file of insatiable marionettes who 
are there to dictate when he may and when he may not give 
throat to his enthusiasm; and finally, if Providence please, to 
be one of the snake-dancing celebrants of victory. If he have 
the right physique or talent for one of the sports, he will find 
himself conscripted by public opinion to enter upon the long 
and arduous regimen that turns out the annual handful of 
athletic heroes — to slave on freshman squads^ class teams, 
scrub and third and second teams, and finally perhaps, if he 
has been faithful, to play a dull minute or two of a big game 
that is already decided and so receive his coveted letter and 
side-line privilege as a charity. Or at the dizziest pinnacle of 
success, a " star," to endure the unremitting discipline of sum- 
mer practice, incessant training, eating with his fellow-stars 
at the training table, in season and out to be the butt of in- 
struction and exhortation from all the experts of the entourage. 
As they affect the participant, then, college sports are to be 
regarded as work that differs from the work of professional 
sportsmen chiefly by being unremunerated. 

The student's next most vivid concern is the organization of 
the social life in the academic commonwealth of which he is a 
citizen. Every American college has, or fancies it has, its 



ii8 CIVILIZATION 

own tone, its ideal type of man; and good citizenship pre- 
scribes conformity to the spirit of the place and observance of 
the letter of its unwritten code. For the type is defined by a 
body of obligations and taboos transmitted from generation to 
generation, sometimes through the mouthpiece of the faculty, 
sometimes by way of the college " Bible " (to use the slang 
name for those handy manuals of what to do and what to avoid 
which the college Y.M.C.A. issues for the guidance of new- 
comers), but most often by a rough process of trial and error 
which very speedily convinces the freshman that the Fence is 
for seniors only, or that it is impracticable to smoke his pipe 
in the Yard, or that it is much healthier to take the air in a 
class cap than bareheaded. The cherished " traditions " of a 
college are for the most part a composite of just such privileges 
and prohibitions as these^ clustering round the notion of the 
t3rpe and symbolizing it; and, curiously, the younger the insti- 
tution, the more insistent it is likely to be about the sanctity 
of its traditions — a college feels the need of a type in much 
the same degree that a factory needs a trademark. 

Conformity thus becomes an article in loyalty. Sometimes 
the mere conformity is the desiderate virtue, as used (at least) 
to be the case in Yale. Sometimes the type will go in for 
individualism, as at Harvard a decade ago, where the thing to 
conform to was non-conformity. One tradition is probably 
universal: is there anywhere in America a college which does 
not boast that it is more " democratic " than others? Democ- 
racy undergoes some engaging redefinition in support of these 
conflicting claims, but at bottom it refers to an absence of 
snobs, arrogant critics, incomprehensible intellectuals, bouncing 
wits, uncomfortable pessimists — in short, the discouragement 
of just such individual tastes and energies as the Martian 
found discouraged in our social life at large. The money line 
remains. Theoretically, the poor may compete in athletics 
and in other student enterprises and reap the same social re- 
wards as the rich: practically, they may compete and go so- 
cially unrewarded, precisely as in the outside world. It is 
natural and seemly that this should be the case, for the poor 
cannot afford the avenues of association 'hich are the breath 
of society to the rich. There have been football heroes whom 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE 119 

the well-to-do have put in the way of acquiring wealth after 
they left college, but this is patronage, not democracy. There 
are also colleges proud to be known as poor men's colleges, and 
for that very reason devoid of the democracy they boast. Not 
long ago the president of Valparaiso had to resign, and it de- 
veloped that among the counts against him were the deadly 
facts that he had attended the annual alumni dinner in dress 
clothes and had countenanced " dances, athletics, fraternities^ 
and such." No, all that we really mean by democracy in col- 
lege is the equal opportunity to invest one's inoffensive charm 
and perfectly good money in a transient society, to be neigh- 
bourly across geographical and family lines, to cultivate the 
local twist of the universal ideal — to be a " regular fellow." 
Which is very much what we mean by democracy outside. 
Whatever the precise type of man a college exalts, its char- 
acteristic virtues are those that reflect a uniform people — 
hearty acceptance of unexamined ideals, loyal conformity to 
traditional standards and taboos, unassuming modesty in 
" playing the game," and a wholesome optimism withal. 

But as for genuine democracy, the unrestricted interplay of 
free spirits against a common background, what college can 
boast that its social organization approaches even the measure 
of equality enjoyed by its disinterested scholars? There was 
a modicum of it in the free elective system that obtained in Dr. 
Eliot's Harvard. There was an indifference to seniority that 
sorely puzzled the graduates of other colleges. Alas, fresh- 
man dormitories descended upon it_, treacherously carrying the 
banners of " democracy "; and a " group system " of courses 
began to externalize intellectual interests to which the elective 
system, abused as it was, had offered every opportunity for 
spontaneity. It may be that the Amherst of Dr. Meiklejohn's 
experiments, or the Smith that President Neilson envisages, will 
recapture opportunities now fled from Cambridge. These 
cases, after all, are exceptional. For the t3T3ical American 
college, private or public, marshals its students in two caste 
systems so universal and so famihar that it never occurs to us 
to scrutinize the one and we are liable to criticize the other 
only when its excesses betray its decadence. 

The former, the divisioning and tagging of every recruit with 



120 CIVILIZATION 

the year of his graduation, looks to be an innocent convenience 
until you have surveyed its regimental effect. Freshmen are 
green; so we clap ridiculous caps on them, dub them " Frosh " 
or " Fish," haze them, confine them to a York Street of their 
kind or impound them in freshman dormitories, where we bid 
them save themselves, the which they do in their sophomore 
year at the expense of the next crop of recruits. It is not so 
much the occasional brutality of hazing parties and " rushes " 
that should arrest us here, nor yet such infrequent accidents as 
the probably insane despair of that Harvard freshman whose 
phobia for eggs drove him to suicide to escape the inflexible 
diet of his class commons, as it is the remorseless mob inva- 
sion of personality and privacy which either leaves the impres- 
sionable boy a victim of his ingrowing sensibility or else con- 
verts him into a martinet who in his turn will cripple others. 
In the case of the Cornell freshman who was ducked for stub- 
bornly refusing to wear the class cap and was saved from 
more duckings by an acting president who advised him — " in 
all friendliness," said the newspapers! — to submit or to with- 
draw from college for a year, it is not necessary to applaud 
what may have been pig-headedness in the victim, or to flay 
what may have been wisdom in the executive, in order to ad- 
mire the single professor who stood ready to resign in order to 
rebuke his college for her bigotry. What was really significant 
here, however, and what is everjrwhere characteristic of this 
sort of benevolent assimilation, was the tone of the university 
daily's editorial apologia: 

" Complete liberty of action has never been recognized by any but 
avowed anarchists; granted the validity of the law, there can be no 
charge of intolerance in the enforcement of it." 

The legal " validity " of an arbitrary tradition! No " intol- 
erance " in its enforcement by Judge Lynch! The editor of 
the Cornell Sun went on to say that the existence of the " law " 
in question is " no secret from the prospective Cornellian," im- 
plying, no doubt, that to offer oneself for matriculation at Cor- 
nell is ipso facto to accept the whole body of Ithacan tradition 
and taboos, along with their interpretation and enforcement 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE 121 

according to the momentary caprice of the majority, as a con- 
trat social. Small wonder he called the refractory freshman 
a " red." The young editor's reasoning should recommend his 
early appointment to a place in the greater Sun. 

The caste system of academic seniority, like all caste sys- 
tems, is worst at its base. Such customs as the sequestering 
of the upper classes in their private quads or ovals, the jealous 
protection of senior privileges, and the calendrical elabora- 
tion of the alumni programme serve to import a picturesque 
if rather forced variety into our drab monotony. That men 
should choose to organize themselves to protect some more or 
less irrelevant distinction is of no special importance to out- 
siders so long as they do not use their organization to dragoon 
minorities or to bully individuals. Yet, speak out against 
the exploitation, and you will be accused of attacking the fel- 
lowship. Criticize the shackling of freshmen, and there will 
not be wanting college editors to call you a fanatic who cannot 
bear the jolly sight of cap and gown. 

The other system of caste, to which we give sharp attention 
when it goes badly wrong, is of course the club hierarchy. 
Wherever there are clubs their social capital will necessarily 
fluctuate with the quality of the members they^take in. The 
reformers who deplore the institution of " rushing " have of 
course exaggerated its evils, but the evils are there. In young 
colleges, and wherever clubs are insecure, the candidates are 
liable to be spoiled for any club purposes before their destina- 
tion is settled; wherever the candidates must do the courting, 
either brazenly or subtly, they tend to debauch the club. The 
dilemma holds, in one form or another, all the way from the 
opposed " literary " societies of the back-woods college to the 
most powerful chapters of the national fraternities; and it is 
particularly acute where the clubhouse is also the student's 
residence. Any remedy thus far advanced by the reformers 
is worse than the disease. 

In many of the older colleges the equilibrium has been 
stabilized by a device similar to the gentlemen's agreement in 
industry. The important clubs have gradually adjusted them- 
selves into a series through which the clubman passes, or into 
which he penetrates as far as his personality and money will 



122 ' CIVILIZATION 

carry him. So the initial competition for untried material is 
done away with or greatly simplified; one or two large fresh- 
man or sophomore clubs take in all the likely candidates; the 
junior clubs do most of their choosing from among this num- 
ber; and the senior clubs in turn draw on the junior. Mean- 
while the member turnover is perhaps trebled, and initiations 
and other gay functions multiply. 

It is to be remembered, however, that not all the brethren 
shift onward and upward year by year. Many have to con- 
tent themselves with clubs already won, and those who pass 
on are a narrowing band, whose depleted ranks are by no 
means restored in the eleventh hour recruiting of " elections 
at large," deathbed gestures of democracy after a career of 
ballotting to exclude candidates who had not taken all the 
earlier degrees. Thus increasing distinction is purchased 
through the tried and true method of decreasing numbers. To 
be sure, the same end could be served if all would remain in 
one club and periodically drop groups of the least likely mem- 
bers. Initiations might be reversed, and punches be given to 
celebrate the lightening of the ship: it would be no more fan- 
tastic than a good part of the existing ceremonial. But — it 
would be undemocratic! And, too, the celebrations might be 
fatally hilarious. The present pre-initiation discipline is one 
that tests for regularity and bestows the accolade on the incon- 
spicuous, so that the initiates turn out pretty much of a piece 
and the entertainment they provide is safely conventional. But 
reverse the process, assemble in one squad all the hands sus- 
pected of being exceptional — all the queer fish and odd sticks — 
and there's no predicting what capers they might cut as they 
walked the plank. 

The real evil of the club caste is its taste for predictability, 
its standardization of contacts, its faintly cynical sophistica- 
tion where life might be a riot of adventures and experiments 
and self -discoveries — in one word, its respectability. Not that 
it does not provide much good fellowship and a great deal of 
fun (including the varieties that have distressed its moral 
critics). But that everything it provides is so definitely pro- 
vided for, so institutionalized, and so protected from the en- 
richment different types and conditions of men could bring 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE 123 

to it that it is exclusive in a more sinister sense than the one 
intended by the critics of its alleged snobbery. 

Normally the club system is by no means so snobbish as 
it is thought to be; it dislikes, and is apt to punish with the 
black ball, the currying of social favour and the parade of 
special privilege. For youth is youth, and in the last analysis 
the enemy of caste. It is the glory of college life that the 
most unexpected friendships will overleap the fences run by 
class and club regimentation. It is its pity that the fences, 
which yield so easily to irregular friendships once they have 
discovered themselves, should nevertheless be stout enough to 
herd their victims past so many unrecognized opportunities 
for spontaneous association. The graduate who looks back 
fondly on his halcyon days is very likely passing over the 
Senior Picnic and his row of shingles to recall haze-hung Octo- 
ber afternoons of tobacco and lazy reminiscence on the window- 
seat of somebody who got nowhere in class or club, or is 
wistful for the midnight arguments he had with that grind who 
lived in his entry freshman year — nights alive with darting 
speculation and warm with generous combat. Of these clan- 
destine sweets he will say nothing; he is a regular fellow; but 
he affords one of the proofs that the well-worn social channels 
are not deep enough to carry off all the wine of free fellowship. 
And that even the moderate caste of college, securely estab- 
lished as it seems, must defend itself from youth (even from 
its own youth ! ) is demonstrated by two phenomena not to be 
explained satisfactorily on any other hypothesis. What is all 
the solemn mummery, the preposterous ritual, the pompous 
processions to and from temples of nightmare architecture, the 
whole sacrosanct edifice of the secret fraternities, if it be not 
an embroidery wherewith to disguise from present and future 
devotees the naked matter-of-factness of the cult? And, on the 
other hand, what are the too early maturity, the atmosphere 
of politely blase languor, the ubiquitous paraphernalia for 
comfort and casual hospitality that characterize the non-secret 
and citified clubs of the " indifferent " college but so many 
disarming confessions of the predictability of everything — the 
predictability, and the necessity for quiet acceptance? Under 
all the encouraging variations and exceptions runs the regi- 



124 CIVILIZATION 

mental command of our unanimity: if you are to belong, you 
must conform; you must accept the limits of the conventional 
world for the bounds of your reality; and then, according to 
the caprice of your genius loci, you will play the game as if 
everything, even the minutiae of the ritual your club has in- 
herited from freer spirits, were of tremendous moment, or you 
will play it no less thoroughly but with the air of one who 
knows that nothing is of any moment at all. The clubs, that 
have so often been criticized for their un-American treason 
to democracy, are only too loyally American. 

The third emphasis would be corollary to these two — the 
political management of athletic and class and club affairs. 
The politics are those of personal popularity, the management 
is that of administration rather than legislation, the spirit is 
the American flair for petty regulation. Where issues are in 
question the tone is almost certain to be propagandist, con- 
servatives and radicals dividing a field littered with hard names. 
College life has accumulated an abundance of machinery for 
the expression of the managing instinct, and most of it works. 
Nowadays the lines of representation finally knot in a Student 
Council, which is at once the Cabinet, the Senate, and the 
Supreme Court of the undergraduate commonwealth. The 
routine of its work is heavily sumptuary, and such matters as 
the sizes and colours and seasons for hatband insignia, the 
length of time students may take off to attend a distant game, 
the marshalling of parades, are decided with taste and tact. 
Then, abruptly, it is a tribunal for major cases, just if severe: 
a class at Yale fails to observe the honour rule, and upon 
the Council's recommendation twenty-one students are expelled 
or suspended; it was the Student Council at Valparaiso that 
secured the president's withdrawal; and at Cornell it was the 
Student Council that came to the rescue of tradition when a 
freshman refused to wear the freshman cap. Invariably, one 
concludes, its edicts and verdicts will support righteousness, as 
its constituents understand righteousness. 

The constituents themselves are ordinarily on the side of 
light, as they see the light. Not so long ago the faculty of 
a small New England college decided to dispense with com- 
pulsory chapel: the students voted it back. Moral crusades 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE 125 

spring up like mushrooms and command the allegiance of all' 
but the recalcitrant " rough-necks," whom student opinion is 
sometimes tempted to feel are beating their way through an 
education for which they make no equivalent return in public 
spirit. A typical campaign of the sort was recently put in 
motion by the student daily at Brown: the editors discovered 
that " the modern age of girls and young men is intensely 
immoral"; they penned sensational editorials that evoked 
column-long echoes in the metropolitan press; they raised a 
crusade against such abominations as petting parties, the tod- 
dle (" Rome," they wrote, " toddled before it fell "), and " par- 
ties continued until after breakfast time "; almost immediately 
they won a victory — the Mothers' Club of Providence resolved 
that dances for children must end by eleven o'clock. . . , 

And now the undergraduate will emphasize study. But a 
sharp line must be drawn between study that looks forward 
merely to the A.B. degree as the end of schooling and the 
beginning of business, and study that is a part of professional 
training, that looks forward to some professional degree at 
Commencement or to matriculation in a graduate school. Both 
come under the head of preparation for life; but in the former 
case the degree itself is the preparation, whereas in the latter 
case it is recognized that one must master and retain at least 
a working modicum of the subject-matter of the professional 
courses and of the liberal courses preliminary to them. 

The arts man, then, recognizes only the same necessity he 
has faced all the way up the school ladder — to pass. If he 
have entrance conditions, they are mortgages that must be paid 
off, perhaps in the Summer School ; he must keep off probation 
to protect his athletic or political or other activity status; be- 
yond this, he must garner enough courses and half-courses, 
semester hours or points, to purchase the indispensable sheep- 
skin. Further effort is supererogatory so far as concerns study 
per se: prizes and distinctions fall in the category of " student 
activities," hobbies, and belong of right to the "sharks"; 
scholarships, which in America are for the poor only, have to 
do with still another matter — earning one's way through — 
and are mostly reserved for the "paid marks men," profes- 
sional studiers, grinds. 



126 CIVILIZATION 

Upon his programme of courses the student will often expend 
as much mental energy as would carry him through an ordinary 
examination: he will pore over the catalogue, be zealous to 
avoid nine o'clocks and afternoon hours liable to conflict with 
games, make an elaborate survey of the comparative com- 
petence of instructors, both as graders and as entertainers and 
even (quaintly enough) as experts in their fields, and enquire 
diligently after snap courses. Enrolled in a course, he will 
speedily estimate the minimum effort that will produce a safe 
pass, unless the subject happens to be one that commends itself 
to his interest independently of academic necessity. In that 
case he will exceed not only the moderate stint calculated to 
earn a C, but sometimes even the instructor's extravagant re- 
quirements. There is, in fact, scarcely a student but has at 
least one pet course in which he will " eat up " all the required 
reading and more, take gratuitous notes, ask endless questions, 
and perhaps make private sallies into research. The fact that 
he holds most of this labour to be self-indulgence will not tem- 
per his indignation if he fails to " pull " an A or B, though it 
is a question whether, when the grade has sealed the course, 
he will be much the wiser for it than for the others. 

On the evils of the course system there is probably no new 
thing to be said. Such devices as the " group system " at Har- 
vard interfere with liberty of election without appreciably cor- 
recting the graduate's ignorance of the courses he has passed 
and cashed in for his degree. Recognizing this fact, certain 
faculties have latterly inaugurated general examinations in the 
whole subject-matter studied under one department, as notably 
in History, Government, and Economics; but thus far the gen- 
eral examination affects professional preparation, as notably for 
the Law School, much more than it affects the straight arts 
career, where it provides just one more obstacle to " pass." 

This business of passing is a seasonal nuisance. The early 
weeks of term-time are an Arcady of fetching lectures, more or 
less interesting assigned reading, and abundant " cuts." Across 
the smiling sky float minatory wisps of cloud — exercises, 
quizzes, tests. Then up from the horizon blow the " hour 
exams," first breath of the academic weather that later on will 
rock the earth with " mid-years " and " finals." But to be 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE 127 

forewarned is, for the prudent student, to get armed, and 
Heaven knows he is amply warned by instructor, registrar, and 
dean. So he hies himself to the armourer, the tutor, one of the 
brotherhood of experts who saw him through the entrance ex- 
aminations; he provides himself with bought or leased note- 
books and summaries; he crams through a few febrile nights 
of cloistral deprivations and flagellations; and the sun shines 
again on his harvest of gentlemen's C's, the proud though su- 
perfluous A or B, and maybe a D that bespeaks better armour 
against the next onset. Or, of course, he may have slipped 
into " probation," limbo that outrageously handicaps his ath- 
letic or political ambitions. Only if he have been a hapless 
probationer before the examinations is there any real risk of 
his having to join the exceedingly small company of living 
sacrifices whom a suddenly austere college now " rusticates." 
(For in America suspensions and expulsions are the penalties 
rather of irregular conduct than of mental incompetence or 
sloth.) In four years, after he has weathered a score of these 
storms and concocted a few theses, the president hands him 
a diploma to frame, he sells his other furniture, puts moth- 
balls in his cap and gown, and plunges into business to over- 
take his non-college competitors. 

Student opinion recognizes that the man enrolled in profes- 
sional courses or headed for a graduate school faces more 
stringent necessities. He may devote himself to his more spe- 
cific training without the imputation of being a " grind," and 
if he pursues honours it will be in the line of business rather 
than of indoor sport. He will be charier of cuts, more pains- 
taking as regards his notes and reading, and the professional 
manner will settle on him early. In every college commons you 
can find a table where the talk is largely shop — hypothetical 
cases, laboratory experiments, new inventions, devices for cir- 
cumventing the income tax. All this, however, is really a quan- 
titative difference, not a qualitative. Of disinterested intel- 
lectual activity he is if anything more innocent than his fellow 
in the arts school. 

So much for the four great necessities of average student life 
— in order of acknowledged importance: athletics, social life, 
politics, study. Deans and other official but theoretical folk 



128 CIVILIZATION 

will tell our Martian that the business of college is study and 
that all the undergraduate's other functions are marginal mat- 
ters; but their own conduct will already have betrayed them 
to him, for he will not have missed the fact that most of their 
labour is devoted to making study as dignified and popular as 
the students have made sports and clubs and elections. These 
four majors hold their places at the head of the list of student 
emphases because no representative undergraduate quite es- 
capes any of them; the next ones may be stressed more vari- 
ously, according rather to the student's capricious private incli- 
nations than to his simpler group reactions. 

Now, for instance, he is free to " go in for " some of the 
innumerable " student activities," avocations as opposed to the 
preceding vocations. There are the minor sports which are not 
so established in popularity that they may conscript players — 
lacrosse, association football, trap shooting, swimming, and so 
on. There are the other intercollegiate competitions — chess 
and debating and what not. The musical clubs, the dramatic 
clubs, the magazines, and many semi-professional and semi- 
social organizations offer in their degree more or less oppor- 
tunity to visit rival institutions. Then, too, there is in the 
larger colleges a club for almost every religious cult, from 
Catholic to Theosophist, whose devotees may crave a closer 
warmth of communion than they realize in the chapel, which 
is ordinarily non-sectarian; a club apiece for some of the great 
fraternal orders; a similar club for each of the political par- 
ties, to say nothing of a branch of the Intercollegiate Socialist 
Society, with another organization forming to supply the col- 
leges with associated Liberal Clubs. Moreover, all the impor- 
tant preparatory schools, private and public, are certain to be 
represented by clubs of their alumni, some of which maintain 
scholarships but all of which do yeoman service scouting for 
athletes. Frequently there is a Cosmopolitan Club for foreign 
students and travelled Americans. And, finally, there are 
clubs to represent the various provinces of knowledge — the 
classics, philosophy, mathematics, the various sciences, and so 
on indefinitely. Then, in colleges in or near cities, there are 
well-organized opportunities for students who care to make a 
hobby of the Uplift and go in for social service. While, for 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE 129 

amateur and professional sharks and grinds, there is the honour 
roll of prizes, scholarships, fellowships, distinctions, and other 
academic honours. Verily a paradise for the joiner. Day by 
day, the calendar of meetings and events printed in the uni- 
versity paper resembles nothing so much as the bulletin board 
of a metropolitan hotel which caters to conventions. 

If at first glance all this welter of endeavour looks to be any- 
thing but evidence of uniformity, at second will appear its sig- 
nificant principle. Every part of it is cemented together by a 
universal institutionalizing of impulses and values. There is 
scarcely a college activity which can serve for a hobby but 
has its shingle and ribbon and certificated niche in the under- 
graduate regime. 

Even the undergraduate's extra-collegiate social life, which 
would probably stand next on the Martian's list, is thoroughly 
regimented. Speaking broadly, it is incorrect to call on girls 
at the nearest girls' college; and, speaking still more broadly, 
there is usually one correct college whereat it is socially in- 
cumbent to pay devoirs. In coeducational institutions the sex 
line is an exacting but astonishingly innocent consumer of time 
and energy, of which the greater part is invested in the sheer 
maintenance of convention. Along both these social avenues 
the student practises a mimicry of what seems to him to be the 
forms regnant in secular society and, intent on the forms, tends 
to miss by a little what neighbourly ease really exists there, so 
that he out-conventionalizes the conventional world. The non- 
college American youth, of both sexes, would scarcely tolerate 
the amount of formalism, chaperonage, and constraint that 
our college youth voluntarily assumes. 

The word " fussing " is the perfect tag for the visiting, the 
taking to games and dances, the cherishing at house-parties, 
and the incessant letter-writing that are the approved commu- 
nications across the sex line. You make a fuss over a girl, 
and there it ends; or you make a fuss over a girl and get 
engaged, and there it ends; or — and this is frequent only in the 
large Western universities where well-nigh all the personable 
youths of the State's society are in college together — you make 
a fuss over a girl, you get engaged, and in due time you get 
married. So far as fussing is concerned, sex is far more 



130 CIVILIZATION 

decorous among collegians than among their non-collegiate fel- 
lows of the same ages and social levels. There is a place, of 
course, where it is indecorous enough; but that place is next 
on the Martian's list. 

Which now shifts its weakening emphasis to recreation. 
You will have thought that most of the foregoing attached to 
recreation and that all play and no work is the undergraduate 
rule. You will have erred. Above this point almost every- 
thing on the list is recognized by the student to be in some sort 
an obligation, a serious concern, a plough on which he finds his 
hand gently laid by custom but which he cannot decently relin- 
quish till he has gained the end of the furrow. 

" Nobody could be busier than the normal undergraduate. His 
team, his paper, his club, show, or other activity, sometimes several 
at once, occupy every spare moment which he can persuade the 
office to let him take from the more formal part of college instruc- 
tion." 

The quotation is not from a baccalaureate sermon: it is from 
the Harvard class oration of 192 1. 

The prime relaxation is talk, infinite talk — within its local 
range, full of tang, flicking with deft satire the rumps of 
pompous asses, burlesquing the comic (that is, the abnormal) 
in campus situations, making of gossip a staccato criticism — 
and beyond that range, a rather desultory patter about pro- 
fessional sport, shows, shallow books_, the froth of fashion, all 
treated lightly but taken with what a gravity! For the other 
relaxations there are, according to taste, the theatre of girls 
and music, the novel, bath-robed sessions at poker and bridge, 
late afternoon tennis or golf or handball (very nearly the only 
sports left to play for their own sake), and the bouts with 
Bacchus and Venus which, though they attract fewer college 
men than non-college men, are everywhere the moral holidays 
that insure our over-driven Puritanism against collapse. 

A favourite subject for college debates and Freshman 
themes argues the case for and against going to college. You 
could listen to scores of such debates, read thousands of such 
themes, without once meeting a clear brief for education as a 
satisfaction of human curiosity. Everywhere below the level 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE 131 

of disinterested scholarship, education is regarded as access to 
that body of common and practical information without which 
one's hands and tongue will be tied in the company of one's 
natural peers. " Institutions of learning," as the National Se- 
curity League lately advised the Vice-President of the United 
States, " are established primarily for the dissemination of 
knowledge, which is acquaintance with fact and not with 
theory." Consequently the universal expectation of the edu- 
cational establishment has little to do with any wakening of 
appropriate if differing personalities, and has everything to 
do with a standard patina, varying only in its lustre, its brighter 
or duller reflection of the established scene. 

Nevertheless, the essential Adam does break through and 
quiz the scene. Though it come lowest in his scale of empha- 
sis, the typical underclassman knows the qualms and hungers 
of curiosity, experiments a little with forbidden fruit, at some 
time fraternizes with a man of richer if disreputable experience, 
perhaps strikes up a wistful friendship with a sympathetic in- 
structor. Then the world of normal duties and rewards and 
certainties closes round him, and security in it becomes his 
first concern. Sometime he intends really to read, to think 
long thoughts again, to go to the bottom of things. Meanwhile 
he falls into the easy habit of applying such words as " radi- 
cal " or " highbrow " to those infrequent hardier spirits who 
continue restless and unappeased. Later in life you will catch 
him explaining that radicalism is a perfectly natural manifes- 
tation of adolescence and the soundest foundation for mature 
conservatism. Wise churchmen still talk that way about re- 
ligious doubt, and bide their time, and later refer to the " death 
of doubt " — which has really been buried alive. The Martian 
would conclude that the function of terrestrial education is to 
bury curiosity alive. 

But could he now feel that this educational establishment, 
this going machine of assimilation, is responsible for our 
uniformity? Will not American school and college life now 
seem too perfect a reflection of American adult life to be its 
parent? Everything in that scale of college values, from 
the vicarious excitements of football to what Santayana 
has called the " deprivations of disbelief " has its exact ana- 



132 CIVILIZATION 

logue in our life at large; and neither any college tradition nor 
yet the " genteel tradition " is of so much significance as the 
will to tradition that both reveal. The Martian will long since 
have suspected himself guilty of a very human error, that of 
getting the cart before the horse. 

For we have made our schools in our own image. They 
are not our prisons^ but our homes. Every now and again 
we discipline a rash instructor who carries too far his private 
taste for developing originality; we pass acts that require 
teachers to sink their own differences in our unanimity; and 
our fatuous faith in the public school system as the " cradle of 
liberty " rests on the political control we exercise over it. Far 
from being the dupes of education, we ourselves dupe the edu- 
cated; and that college men do not rebel is due to the fact 
that inside a world our uniformity dominates as easily as it 
dominates the school, the regimen works, college men really 
do get ahead, and the " queer " really are frustrate. 

Then, what is the origin of our " desperate need to agree "? 
There is a possible answer in our history, if only we can be 
persuaded to give our history a little attention. When we be- 
came a nation we were not a folk. We were, in fact, so far 
from being alike that there were only our common grievances 
and a few propositions on which we could be got together at 
all, and the propositions were more like stubborn articles of 
faith than like tested observations: "We hold these truths to 
be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . . certain 
inalienable Rights . . . Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Hap- 
piness . . . the consent of the governed . . . are, and of 
Right ought to be. Free and Independent States." That is not 
the tone of men who are partakers in a common tradition and 
who share reasonable and familiar convictions. Thus under 
the spur of our first national necessity we gave the first evi- 
dence of our capacity to substitute an arbitrary and not too 
exacting lowest common denominator to which men can sub- 
scribe, for the natural and rigorous highest common multiple 
that expresses their genuine community of interest. The de- 
vice succeeded because we succeeded, but it was the proposi- 
tions that got the credit. The device has continued to suc- 
ceed ever since for the same reason that tradition succeeds in 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE 133 

the modern college — nobody who has had any reason to chal- 
lenge the propositions has been able to get at us. 

Our proper job was to create a people, to get acquainted 
with each other and develop a common background. But the 
almost miraculous success of our lowest common denominator 
stood in the way of our working out any highest common mul- 
tiple. Instead of developing a common background, we went 
on assimilating subscribers to the Declaration, our arbitrary 
tradition, " Americanism." We have been so increasingly be- 
set by aliens who had to be assimilated that their Americaniza- 
tion has prevented our own. 

We now believe our national job was the Conquest of the 
West, as if scattering people over a continent were any sub- 
stitute for creating a People. But we have never been seri- 
ously challenged. If our good luck should hold, the second 
or third generation after us will believe our job was the sub- 
jugation of a hemisphere, including the assimilation of genu- 
ine peoples who have done us less harm even than the Indians 
did. But, whatever our practice, we shall never admit that 
our theory has altered. Still lacking any common background, 
we shall still enclose ourselves against the void in the painted 
scene of our tradition. 

But our luck may not hold. We may be challenged yet. 

Clarence Britten 



THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE 

WHEN Professor Einstein roused the ire of the women's 
clubs by stating that " women dominate the entire Hfe 
of America," and that " there are cities with a million popu- 
lation, but cities suffering from terrible poverty — the poverty 
of intellectual things," he was but repeating a criticism of our 
life now old enough to be almost a cliche. Hardly any intel- 
ligent foreigner has failed to observe and comment upon the 
extraordinary feminization of American social life, and often- 
est he has coupled this observation with a few biting remarks 
concerning the intellectual anaemia or torpor that seems to 
accompany it. Naturally this attitude is resented, and the 
indiscreet visitor is told that he has been rendered astigmatic 
by too limited observation. He is further informed that he 
should travel in our country more extensively, see more peo- 
ple, and live among us longer. The inference is that this 
chastening process will in due time acquaint him with a beauty 
and a thrilling intellectual vitality coyly hidden from the super- 
ficial impressionist. 

Now the thesis of this paper is that the spontaneous judg- 
ment of the perceptive foreigner is to a remarkable degree cor- 
rect. But it is a judgment which has to be modified in cer- 
tain respects rather sharply. Moreover, even long residence 
in the United States is not likely to give a visitor as vivid a 
sense of the historical background that has so largely con- 
tributed to the present situation as is aroused in the native 
American, who in his own family hears the folklore of the two 
generations preceding him and to whom the pioneer tradition 
is a reality more imaginatively plausible than, say, the emana- 
tions of glory from English fields or the aura of ancient pomp 
enwrapiDing an Italian castle. The foreigner is too likely to 
forget that in a young country, precisely because it is young, 
traditions have a social sanction unknown in an older coun- 
try where memory of the past goes so far back as to become 

135 



136 CIVILIZATION 

shadowy and unreal. It is a paradox of history that from 
ancient cultures usually come those who " were born too soon," 
whereas from young and groping civilizations spring the pano- 
plied defenders of conventions.' It is usually when a tradition 
is fresh that it is respected most; it is only when it has been 
followed for years sufficient to make it meaningless that it can 
create its repudiators. America is a very young country — and 
in no respect younger than that of all Western nations it has 
the oldest form of established government; our naive respect 
for the fathers is surest proof that we are still in the cultural 
awkward age. We have not sufficiently grown up but that 
we must still cling to our father and mother. In a word, we 
still think in pioneer terms, whatever the material and eco- 
nomic facts of a day that has already outgrown their applica- 
bility. 

And it is the pioneer point of view, once thoroughly under- 
stood, which will most satisfactorily explain the peculiar de- 
velopment of the intellectual life in the United States. For 
the life of the mind is no fine flower of impoverishment, and 
if the beginnings of human reflection were the wayward rev- 
eries of seamen in the long watches of the night or of a shep- 
herd lying on his back idly watching the summer clouds float 
past, as surely have the considered intellectual achievements of 
modern men been due to the commercial and industrial organi- 
zation which, whether or not conducive to the general happi- 
ness, has at least made leisure possible for the few. But in 
the pioneer community leisure cannot exist, even for the few; 
the struggle is too merciless, the stake — life itself, possibly — 
too high. The pioneer must almost of necessity hate the 
thinker, even when he does not despise thought in itself, be- 
cause the thinker is a liability to a community that can afford 
only assets; he is non-productive in himself and a dangerously 
subversive example to others. Of course, the pioneer will 
tolerate the minister, exactly as primitive tribes tolerated medi- 
cine men — and largely for the same reasons. The minister, 
if he cannot bring rain or ward off pestilence as the medicine 
man at least pretended he could, can soften the hardness of 
the human lot and can show the road to a future kingdom 
that will amply compensate for the drudgery of the present 



THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE 137 

world. He has, in brief, considerable utilitarian value. The 
thinker per se, however, has none; not only that, he is a re- 
proach and a challenge to the man who must labour by the 
sweat of his brow — it is as if he said, " For what end, all this 
turmoil and effort, merely to live? B^^do you know if life 
is worth while on such terms? " Questions like these the 
pioneer must cast far frojm him, and for the very good reason 
that if they were toherated, new communities might never be- 
come settled. Scepticism is an expensive luxury possible only 
to men in cities living off the fruit of others' toil. Certainly 
America, up to the end of the reconstruction period following 
the Civil War, had little practical opportunity and less native 
in«Jse for the cultivation of this tolerant attitude towards 
ulOTiate values, an atmosphere which is a talisman that a true 
intellectual life is flourishing. 

Consider the terrible hardness of the pioneer's physical life. 
I can think of no better description of it than in one of Sher- 
■v^ood Anderson's stories, " Godliness," in his book, " Wines- 
burg^ Ohio." He is writing of the Bentley brothers just before 
the Civil War : " They clung to old traditions and worked 
like driven animals. They lived as practically all of the 
farming people of the time lived. In the spring and through 
most of the winter the highways leading into the town of 
Winesburg were a sea of mud. The four young men of the 
family worked hard all day in the fields, they ate heavily of 
coarse, greasy food, and at night slept like tired beasts on beds 
of straw. Into their lives came little that was not coarse and 
brutal, and outwardly they were themselves coarse and brutal." 
Naturally, this intense concentration upon work is not the 
whole of the picture; there was gaiety and often there was 
romance in the early days of pioneering, it ran like a coloured 
thread through all the story of our Drang nach Westen. But 
on the whole the period from our confederation into a Union 
until the expanding industrial era following the Civil War — 
roughly the century from 1783 to 1883 — was a period in which 
the cardinal command was, " Be active, be bold, and above all, 
work." In that century we subdued and populated a conti- 
nent. There was no time for the distractions of art or the 
amenities of literature. 



138 CIVILIZATION 

To be sure, a short-range perspective seems to belie this lasfc 
generalization. The colonial times and the first part of the 
19th century witnessed a valid and momentous literary and 
intellectual efflorescence, and it was then we contributed many 
names to the biography of greatness. Yet it was a culture 
centred almost wholly in New England and wholly East of 
the Alleghanies; it had its vitality because it was not self- 
conscious, it was frankly derivative from England and Europe, 
it made no pretensions to being intrinsically American. The 
great current of our national life went irresistibly along, 
ploughing, and tilling, and cutting down the trees and brush, 
making roads and bridges as it filled the valleys and the plains. 
That was the real America, a mighty river of life, compared 
with which, for instance, Emerson and the Transcendentalists 
seemed a mere backwater — not a stagnant or brackish one to 
be sure, often a pool of quietude in which the stars, like Emer- 
son's sentences, might be reflected. But the real America 
was still in the heart of the pioneer. And in one sense, it 
still is to-day. 

The " real America," I say, because I mean the America of 
mind and attitude, the inner truth, not the outer actuality. 
That outer actuality has made the fact of the pioneer almost 
grotesque. The frontier is closed; the nation is the most 
prosperous among the harassed ones of the earth; there is no 
need for the old perpetual preoccupation with material exist- 
ence. In spite of trade depressions and wars and their after- 
maths, we have conquered that problem. But we have not 
conquered ourselves. We must still go on in the ol3 terms, as 
if the purpose of making money in order to make more money 
were as important as the purpose of raising bread in order 
to support life. The facts have changed, but we have not 
changed, only deflected our interests. Where the pioneer 
cleared a wilderness, the moaern financier subdues a forest of 
competitors. He puts the same amount of energy and essen- 
tially the same quality of thought into his task to-day, although 
the practical consequences can hardly be described as identical. 

And what have been those practical consequences? As the 
industrial revolution expanded, coincidently with the filling up 
of the country, the surplus began to grow. That surplus was 



THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE 139 

expended not towards the enrichment of our life — if one omit 
the perfunctory bequests for education — but towards the most 
obvious of unnecessary luxuries, the grandiose maintenance 
of our women. The daughters of pioneer mothers found 
themselves without a real job, often, indeed, the chief instru- 
ment for advertising their husbands' incomes. For years the 
Victorian conception of women as ornaments dominated what 
we were pleased to call our " better elements " — those years, 
to put it brutally, which coincided with that early prosperity 
that made the conception possible. If the leisure of the landed 
gentry class of colonial times had been other than a direct 
importation, if there had ever been a genuine salon in our 
cultural history, or if our early moneyed aristocracy had ever 
felt itself really secure from the constant challenge of immi- 
grant newcomers, this surplus might have gone towards the 
deepening and widening of what we could have felt to be an 
indigenous tradition. Or if, indeed, the Cavalier traditions 
of the South (the only offshoot of the Renaissance in America) 
had not been drained of all vitality by the Civil War and its 
economic and intellectual consequences, this surplus might 
have enhanced the more gracious aspects of those traditions. 
None of these possibilities existed; and when prosperity smiled 
on us we were embarrassed. We were parvenus — even to this 
day the comic series, " Bringing Up Father," has a native 
tang. We know exactly how Mr. Jiggs feels when Mrs. Jiggs 
drags him away to a concert and makes him dress for a stiff, 
formal dinner, when all his heart desires is to smoke his pipe 
and play poker with Dinty and the boys. Indeed, this series, 
which appears regularly in all the newspapers controlled by 
Mr. Hearst, will repay the social historian all the attention he 
gives it. It symbolises better than most of us appreciate the 
normal relationship of American men and women to cultural 
and intellectual values. Its very grotesqueness and vulgarity 
are revealing. 

In no country as in the United States have the tragic con- 
sequences of the lack of any common concept of the good life 
been so strikingly exemplified, and in no country has the break 
with those common concepts been so sharp. After all, when 
other colonies have been founded, when other peoples have 



140 CIVILIZATION 

roved from the homeland and settled in distant parts, they have 
carried with them more than mere scraps of tradition. Often- 
est they have carried the most precious human asset of all, a 
heritage of common feeling, which enabled them to cling to 
the substance of the old forms even while they adapted them 
to the new conditions of life. But with us the repudiation of 
the old heritages was complete; we deliberately sought a new 
way of life, for in the circumstances under which we came into 
national being, breaking with the past was synonymous with 
casting off oppression. The hopefulness, the eagerness, the 
enthusiasm of that conscious attempt to adjudge all things 
afresh found its classic expression in the eloquent if vague 
Declaration of Independence, not even the abstract phrase- 
ology of which could hide the revolutionary fervour beneath. 
Yet a few short years and that early high mood of adventure 
had almost evaporated, and men were distracted from the 
former vision by the prospect of limitless economic expansion, 
both for the individual and the nation as a whole. The Decla- 
ration symbolized only a short interlude in the pioneer spirit 
which brought us here and then led us forth to conquer the 
riches nature, with her fine contempt of human values, so 
generously spread before us. The end of the revolutionary 
mood came as soon as the signing of the Constitution by the 
States, that admirable working compromise in government 
which made no attempt to underscore democracy, as we un- 
derstand it to-day, but rather to hold it in proper check and 
balance. Free, then, of any common heritage or tradition 
which might question his values, free, also, of the troublesome 
idealism of the older revolutionary mood, the ordinary man 
could go forth into the wilderness with singleness of purpose. 
He could be, as he still is to-day, the pioneer toujours. 

Now when his success in his half -chosen role made it un- 
necessary for him to play it, it was precisely the lack of a 
common concept of the good life which made it impossible for 
him to be anything else. It is not that Americans make money 
because they love to do so, but because there is nothing else 
to do; oddly enough, it is not even that the possessive instincts 
are especially strong with us (I think the French, for instance, 
are naturally more avaricious than we), but that we have nOy 



THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE 141 

notion of a definite type of life for which a small income is 
enough, and no notion of any type of life from which work has 
been consciously eliminated. Never in any national sense 
having had leisure, as individuals we do not know what to do 
with it when good fortune gives it to us. Unlike a real game, 
we must go on playing our game even after we have won. 

But if the successful pioneer did not know what to do with 
his own leisure, he had naive faith in the capacity of his 
women to know what to do with theirs. With the chivalric 
sentimentality that often accompanies the prosperity of the 
primitive, the pioneer determined that his good luck should 
bestow upon his wife and sisters and mother and aunts a gift, 
the possession of which slightly embarrassed himself. He 
gave them leisure exactly as the typical business man of to- 
day gives them a blank check signed with his name. It 
disposed of them, kept them out of his world, and salved his 
conscience — like a check to charity. Unluckily for him, his 
mother, his wife, his sisters, and his aunts were of his own 
blood and breeding; they were the daughters of pioneers hke 
himself, and the daughters of mothers who had contributed 
share and share alike to those foundations which had made 
his success possible. Although a few developed latent quali- 
ties of parasitism, the majority were strangely discontented 
(strangely, that is, from his point of view) with the job of 
mere Victorian ornament. What more natural under the cir- 
cumstances than that the unimportant things of life — art, 
music, religion, literature, the intellectual life — should be 
handed over to them to keep them busy and contented, while 
he confined himself to the real man's job of making money 
and getting on in the world? Was it not a happy and sensible 
adaptation of function? 

Happy or not, it was exactly what took place. To an extent 
almost incomprehensible to the peoples of older cultures, the 
things of the mind and the spirit have been given over, in 
America, into the almost exclusive custody of women. This 
has been true certainly of art, certainly of music, certainly of 
education. The spinster school-marm has settled in the 
impressionable, adolescent minds of boys the conviction that 
the cultural interests are largely an affair of the other sex; 



142 CIVILIZATION 

the intellectual life can have no connection with native gaiety, 
with sexual curiosity, with play, with creative dreaming, or 
with adventure. These more genuine impulses, he is made to 
feel, are not merely distinguishable from the intellectual life, 
but actually at war with it. In my own day at Harvard the 
Westerners in my class looked with considerable suspicion 
upon those who specialized in literature, the classics, or philos- 
ophy — a man's education should be science, economics, engi- 
neering. Only " sissies," I was informed, took courses in 
poetry out in that virile West, And to this day for a boy to 
be taught to play the piano, for example, is regarded as 
" queer," whereas for a girl to be so taught is entirely in the 
nature of things. That is, natural aptitude has nothing to 
do with it; some interests are proper for women, others for 
men. Of course there are exceptions enough to make even 
the boldest hesitate at generalizations, yet assuredly the con- 
tempt, as measured in the only terms we thoroughly under- 
stand, money, with which male teachers, male professors (se- 
cretly), male ministers, and male artists are universally held 
should convince the most prejudiced that, speaking broadly, 
this generalization is in substance correct. 

In fact, when we try to survey the currents of our entire 
national life, to assess these vagrant winds of doctrine free 
from the ingenuousness that our own academic experience ot 
training may give us, the more shall we perceive that the 
dichotomy between the cultural and intellectual life of men 
and women in this country has been carried farther than any- 
where else in the world. We need only recall the older* 
women's clubs of the comic papers — in truth, the actual 
women's clubs of to-day as revealed by small-town newspaper 
reports of their meetings — the now deliquescent Browning 
Clubs, the Chautauquas, the church festivals, the rural nor- 
mal schools for teachers, the women's magazines, the countless 
national organizations for improving, elevating, uplifting this, 
that, or the other. One shudders slightly and turns to the 
impeccable style, the slightly tired and sensuous irony of 
Anatole France (not yet censored, if we read him in French) 
for relief. Or if we are so fortunate as to be " regular " 
Americans instead of unhappy intellectuals educated beyond 



THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE 143 

our environment, we go gratefully back to our work at the 
office. Beside the stilted artificiality of this world of higher 
ethical values the business world, where men haggle, cheat, and 
steal with whole-hearted devotion is at least real. And it is 
this world, the world of making money, in which alone the 
American man can feel thoroughly at home. If the French 
romanticists of the i8th century invented the phrase la femme 
mecomprise, a modern Gallic visitor would be tempted to ob- 
serve that in this 20th century the United States was the 
land of I'homme mecompris. 

These, then, are the cruder historical forces that have led 
directly to the present remarkable situation, a situation, of 
course, which I attempt to depict only in its larger outlines. 
For the surface of the contemporary social structure shows us 
suffrage, the new insights into the world of industry which the 
war gave so many women for the first time, the widening of 
professional opportunity, co-education, and, in the life which 
perhaps those of us who have contributed to this volume know 
best, a genuine intellectual camaraderie. Nevertheless, I be- 
lieve the underlying thesis cannot be successfully challenged. 
Where men and women in America to-day share their intel- 
lectual life on terms of equality and perfect understand- 
ing, closer examination reveals that the phenomenon is not 
a sharing but a capitulation. The men have been femi- 
nized. 

Thus far through this essay I have by implication rather 
than direct statement contrasted genuine interest in intellectual 
things with the kind of intellectual life led by women. Let me 
say now that no intention is less mine than to contribute to 
the old controversy concerning the respective intellectual ca- 
pacities of the two sexes. If I use the adjective " masculine " 
to denote a more valid type of intellectual impulse than is ex- 
pressed by the adjective " feminine," it is not to belittle the 
quality of the second impulse; it is a matter of definition. 
Further, the relative degree of " masculine " and " feminine " 
traits possessed by an individual are almost as much the result 
of acquired training as of native inheritance. The young, in- 
dependent college girl of to-day is in fact more likely to pos- 
sess " masculine " intellectual habits than is the average 



144 CIVILIZATION 

Y.M.C.A. director. I use the adjectives to express broad, 
general characteristics as they are commonly under- 
stood. 

For a direct examination of the intellectual life of women 
— which, I repeat, is practically the intellectual life of the 
nation — in the United States shows the necessity of terms be- 
ing defined more sharply. Interest in intellectual things is 
first, last, and all the time disinterested; it is the love of truth, 
if not exclusively for its own sake, at least without fear of 
consequences, in fact with precious little thought about con- 
sequences. This does not mean that such exercise of the 
native disposition to think, such slaking of the natural meta- 
physical curiosity in all of us, is not a process enwrapped — 'as 
truly as the disposition to make love or to get angry — with 
an emotional aura of its own, a passion as distinctive as any 
other. It merely means that the occasions which stimulate this 
innate intellectual disposition are of a different sort than those 
which stimulate our other dispositions. An imaginative pic- 
ture of one's enlarged social self will arouse our instincts of 
ambition or a desire to found a family, whereas curiosity or 
wonder about the mystery of life, the meaning of death, the 
ultimate nature of God (objects of desire as truly as other 
objects) will arouse our intellectual disposition. These occa- 
sions, objects, hypotheses are of necessity without moral sig- 
nificance. The values inherent in them are the values of sat- 
isfied contemplation and not of practical result. Their imme- 
diate utility — although their ultimate, by the paradox that is 
constantly making mere common sense inadequate, may be 
very great — is only subjective. In this sense, they seem way- 
ward and masculine; and, cardinal sin of all, useless. 

Perhaps the meaning of the " feminine " approach to the 
intellectual life may be made somewhat clearer by this pre- 
liminary definition. The basic assumption of such an ap- 
proach is that ideas are measured for their value by terms 
outside the ideas themselves, or, as Mrs. Mary Austin re- 
cently said in a magazine article, by " her [woman's] deep 
sense of social applicability as the test of value." Fundamen- 
tally, in a word, the intellectual life is an instrument of moral 
reform; the real test of ideas lies in their utilitarian success. 



THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE 145 

Hence it is hardly surprising that the intellectual life, as I 
have defined it, of women in America turns out on examination 
not to be an intellectual life at all, but sociological activity. 
The best of modern women thinkers in the United States — 
and there are many — are oftenest technical experts, keen to 
apply knowledge and skill to the formulation of a technique 
for the better solution of problems the answers to which are 
already assumed. The question of fundamental ends is sel- 
dom if ever raised: for example, the desirability of the mod- 
ern family, the desirability of children glowing with health, the 
desirability of monogamy are not challenged. They are as- 
sumed as ends desirable in themselves, and what women usu- 
ally understand by the intellectual life is the application of 
modern scientific methods to a sort of enlarged and subtler 
course in domestic science. 

This attitude of contempt for mere intellectual values has 
of course been strengthened by the native pioneer suspicion 
of all thought that does not issue immediately in successful 
action. The remarkable growth of pragmatism, and its sturdy 
offspring instrumentalism, where ideas become but the lowly 
handmaidens of " getting on," has been possible to the extent 
to which we see it to-day precisely because the intellectual 
atmosphere has been surcharged with this feminized utilitari- 
anism. We are deeply uncomfortable before introspection, 
contemplation, or scrupulous adherence to logical sequence. 
Women do not hesitate to call these activities cold, impersonal, 
indirect — I believe they have a phrase for them, " the poobah 
tradition of learning." With us the concept of the intellect 
as a soulless machine operating in a rather clammy void has 
acquired the force of folklore because we have so much wished 
to strip it of warmth and colour. We have wanted to dis- 
credit it in itself; we have respected it only for what it could 
do. If its operations lead to better sanitation, better milk 
for babies, and larger bridges over which, in Matthew Arnold's 
phrase, we might cross more rapidly from one dismal, illiberal 
city to another dismal, illiberal city, then those operations have 
been justified. That the life of the mind might have an emo- 
tional drive, a sting or vibrancy of its own, constituting as 
valuable a contribution to human happiness as, say, the satis- 



146 CIVILIZATION 

fied marital felicity of the bacteria-less suburbanite in his 
concrete villa has been incomprehensible. Every science must 
be an applied science, the intellect must be applied intellect 
before we thoroughly understand it. We have created an 
environment in which the intellectual impulses must become 
fundamentally social in quality and mood, whereas the truth 
of the matter is that these impulses, like the religious impulse, 
in their pristine spontaneity are basically individualistic and 
capricious rather than disciplined. 

But such individualism in thought, unless mellowed by con- 
tact with institutions that assume and cherish it and thus can, 
without patronizing, correct its wildnesses, inevitably turns 
into eccentricity. And such, unfortunately, has too often been 
the history of American intellectuals. The institutional struc- 
ture that might sustain them and keep them on the main 
track of the humanistic tradition has been too fragile and 
too slight. The university and college life, the educational 
institutions, even the discipline of scholarship, as other essays 
in this volume show us, have been of very little assistance. 
Even the church has provoked recalcitrance rather than any 
real reorientation of religious viewpoint, and our atheists — 
recall Ingersoll — have ordinarily been quite conventional in 
their intellectual outlook. With educated Englishmen, for ex- 
ample, whatever their religious, economic, or political views, 
there has been a certain common tradition or point of depar- 
ture and understanding, i.e., the classics. Mr. Balfour can 
speak the same language as Mr. Bertrand Russell, even when 
he is a member of a government that puts Mr. Russell in gaol 
for his political opposition to the late war. But it really is a 
strain on the imagination to picture Mr. Denby quoting Hume 
to refute Mr. Weeks, or Vice-President Coolidge engaging in 
an epistemological controversy with Postmaster-General Hays. 
There is no intellectual background common to President 
Harding and Convict Debs or to any one person and possibly 
as many as a hundred others — there are only common social 
or geographical backgrounds, in which the absence of a real 
community of interests is pathetically emphasized by grotesque 
emphasis upon fraternal solidarity, as when Mr. Harding dis- 
covered that he and his chauffeur belonged to the same lodge, 



THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE 147 

regarding this purely fortuitous fact as a symbol of the healing 
power of the Fathers and of American Democracy! 

In such an atmosphere of shadowy spiritual relationships, 
where the thinness of contact of mind with mind is childishly 
disguised under the banner of good fellowship, it might be 
expected that the intellectual life must be led not only with 
that degree of individualistic isolation which is naturally nec- 
essary for its existence, but likewise in a hostile and unintel- 
ligent environment of almost enforced " difference " from the 
general social type. Such an atmosphere will become as in- 
fested with cranks, fanatics, mushroom religious enthusiasts, 
moral prigs with new schemes of perfectability, inventors of 
perpetual motion, illiterate novelists, and oratorical cretins, as 
a swamp with mosquitoes. They seem to breed almost over- 
night; we have no standard to which the wise and the foolish 
may equally repair, no criterion by which spontaneously to 
appraise them and thus, by robbing them of the breath of 
their life, recognition, reduce their numbers. On the contrary, 
we welcome them all with a kind of Jamesian gusto, as if 
every fool, like every citizen, must have his right to vote. It 
is a kind of intellectual enfranchisement that produces the 
same sort of leadership which, in the political field of com- 
plete suffrage, we suffer under from Washington and our vari- 
ous State capitals. Our intellectual life, when we judge it 
objectively on the side of vigour and diversity, too often seems 
like a democracy of mountebanks. 

Yet when we turn from the more naive and popular experi- 
ments for finding expression for the baulked disposition to 
think, the more sophisticated jeunesse doree of our cultural 
life are equally crippled and sterile. They suffer not so much 
from being thought and being " queer " — in fact, inwardly 
deeply uncomfortable at not being successful business men, 
they are scrupulously conventional in manner and appearance 
— but from what Professor Santayana has called, with his 
usual felicity, " the genteel tradition." It is a blight that 
falls on the just and the unjust; like George Bernard Shaw, 
they are tolerant before the caprices of the mind, and intol- 
erant before the caprices of the body. They acquire their 
disability from the essentially American (and essentially femi- 



148 CIVILIZATION 

nine) timorousness before life itself; they seem to want to 
confine, as do all good husbands and providers, adventure to 
mental adventure and tragedy to an error in ratiocination. 
They will discant generously about liberty of opinion — al- 
though, strictly speaking, opinion is always free; all that is 
restricted is the right to put it into words — yet seem singu- 
larly silent concerning liberty of action. If this were a mere 
temperamental defect, it would of course have no importance. 
But it cuts much deeper. Thought, like mist, arises from 
the earth, and to it must eventually return, if it is not to be 
dissipated into the ether. The genteel tradition, which has 
stolen from the intellectual life its own proper possessions, 
gaiety and laughter, has left it sour and deracine. It has lost 
its earthy roots, its sensuous fulness, its bodily mise-en-scene. 
One has the feeling, when one talks to our correct intellectuals, 
that they are somehow brittle and might be cracked with a pun, 
a low story, or an animal grotesquerie as an eggshell might be 
cracked. Yet whatever else thought may be in itself, surely 
we know that it has a biological history and an animal set- 
ting; it can reach its own proper dignity and effectiveness 
only when it functions in some kind of rational relationship 
with the more clamorous instincts of the body. The adjust- 
ment must be one of harmony and welcome; real thinkers do 
not make this ascetic divorce between the passions and the 
intellect, the emotions and the reason, which is the central 
characteristic of the genteel tradition. Thought is nourished 
by the soil it feeds on, and in America to-day that soil is 
choked with the feckless weeds of correctness. Our sanitary 
perfection, our material organization of goods, our muffling of 
emotion, our deprecation of curiosity, our fear of idle adven- 
ture, our horror of disease and death, our denial of suffering—' 
what kind of soil of life is that? 

Surely not an over-gracious or thrilling one; small wondef 
that our intellectual plants wither in this carefully aseptic 
sunlight. 

Nevertheless, though I was tempted to give the sub-title " A 
Study in Sterility " to this essay, I do not believe that out 
soil is wholly sterile. Beneath the surface barrenness stirs 
a germinal energy that may yet push its way through the 



THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE 149 

weeds and the tin-cans of those who are afraid of life. If 
the genteel tradition did not succumb to the broad challenge 
of Whitman^ his invitations have not been wholly rejected by 
the second generation following him. The most hopeful thing 
of intellectual promise in America to-day is the contempt of 
the younger people for their elders; they are restless, uneasy, 
disaffected. It is not a disciplined contempt; it is not yet 
kindled by any real love of intellectual values — how could it 
be? Yet it is a genuine and moving attempt to create a way 
of life free from the bondage of an authority that has lost all 
meaning, even to those who wield it. Some it drives in futile 
and pathetic expatriotism from the country; others it makes 
headstrong and reckless; many it forces underground, where, 
much as in Russia before the revolution of 1905, the intelli- 
gentsia meet their own kind and share the difficulties of their 
common struggle against an environment that is out to destroy 
them. But whatever its crudeness and headiness, it is a yeast 
composed always of those who will not conform. The more 
the pressure of standardization is applied to them the sharper 
and keener — if often the wilder — becomes their rebellion 
against it. Just now these non-conformists constitute a spir- 
itual fellowship which is disorganized and with few points of 
contact. It may be ground out of existence, for history is 
merciless and every humanistic interlude resembles a perilous 
equipoise of barbaric forces. Only arrogance and self- 
complacency give warrant for assuming that we may not be 
facing a new kind of dark age. On the other hand, if the 
more amiable and civilized of the generation now growing up 
can somehow consolidate their scattered powers, what may 
they not accomplish? For we have a vitality and nervous 
alertness which, properly channelled and directed, might cut 
through the rocks of stupidity with the precision and spacious- 
ness with which our mechanical inventions have seized on our 
natural resources and turned them into material goods. Our 
cup of life is full to the brim. 

I like to think that this cup will not all be poured upon 
the sandy deltas of industrialism ... we have so much to 
spare! Climb to the top of the Palisades and watch the great 
city in the deepening dusk as light after light, and rows of 



150 CIVILIZATION 

lights after rows, topped by towers of radiance at the end 
of the island, shine tiirough the shadows across the river. 
Think, then, of the miles of rolling plains, fertile and dotted 
with cities, stretching behind one to that other ocean which 
washes a civilization that was old before we were born and 
yet to-day gratefully accepts our pitiful doles to keep it from 
starvation, of the millions of human aspirations and hopes 
and youthful eagernesses contained in the great sprawling, un- 
easy entity we call our country — must all the hidden beauty 
and magic and laughter we know is ours be quenched because 
we lack the courage to make it proud and defiant? Or walk 
down the Avenue some late October morning when the sun 
sparkles in a clear and electric air such as can be found no- 
where else in the world. The flashing beauty of form, the 
rising step of confident animalism, the quick smile of fertile 
minds — must all these things, too, be reduced to a drab uni- 
formity because we lack the courage to proclaim their sheer 
physical loveliness? Has not the magic of America been hid- 
den under a fog of ugliness by those who never really loved 
it, who never knew our natural gaiety and high spirits and 
eagerness for knowledge? They have the upper hand now — 
but who would dare to prophesy that they can keep it? 

Perhaps this is only a day-dream, but surely one can hope 
that the America of our natural affections rather than the pres- 
ent one of enforced dull standardization may some day snap 
the shackles of those who to-day keep it a spiritual prison. 
And as surely will it be the rebellious and disaffected who ac- 
complish the miracle, if it is ever accomplished. Because at 
bottom their revolt, unlike the aggressions of the standardizers, 
is founded not on hate of what they cannot understand, but 
on love of what they wish all to share. 

Harold E. Stearns 



SCIENCE 

THE scientific work of our countrymen has probably 
evoked less scepticism on the part of foreign judges than 
their achievements in other departments of cultural activity. 
There is one obvious reason for this difference. When our 
letters, our art, our music are criticized with disdainfully faint 
commendation, it is because they have failed to attain the 
higher reaches of creative effort. Supreme accomplishment in 
art certainly presupposes a graduated series of lesser strivings, 
yet from what might be called the consumer's angle, mediocrity 
is worthless and incapable of giving inspiration to genius. But 
in science it is otherwise. Here every bit of sound work — 
however commonplace^ — counts as a contribution to the stock 
of knowledge; and, what is more, on labours of this lesser or- 
der the superior mind is frequently dependent for its own 
syntheses. A combination of intelligence, technical efficiency, 
and application may not by itself suffice to read the riddles 
of the universe; but, to change the metaphor, it may well pro- 
vide the foundation for the epoch-makers' structure. So while 
it is derogatory to American literature to be considered a mere 
reflection of English letters, it is no reflection on American 
scientists that they have gone to Europe to acquire that crafts- 
manship which is an indispensable prerequisite to fruitful 
research. And when we find Alexander von Humboldt praising 
in conversation with Silliman the geographical results of Maury 
and Fremont, there is no reason to suspect him of perfunctory 
politeness to a transatlantic visitor; the veteran scholar might 
well rejoice in the ever widening application of methods he 
had himself aided in perfecting. 

Thus even seventy years ago and more the United States had 
by honest, painstaking labour made worthwhile additions to 
human knowledge and these contributions have naturally mul- 
tiplied a hundredfold with the lapse of years. Yet it would be 

IS! 



152 CIVILIZATION 

quite misleading to make it appear as if the total represented 
merely a vast accumulation of uninspired routine jobs. Some 
years ago, to be sure, an American writer rather sensationally 
voiced his discontent with the paucity of celebrated savants 
among our countrymen. But he forgot that in science fame 
is a very inadequate index of merit. The precise contribution 
made by one man's individual abihty is one of the most tan- 
talizingly difficult things to determine — so much so that schol- 
ars are still debating in what measure Galileo's predecessors 
paved the way for his discoveries in dynamics. For a layman, 
then, to appraise the relative significance of this or that intel- 
lectual worthy on the basis of current gossip is rather absurd. 
Certainly the lack of a popular reputation is a poor reason 
for denying greatness to a contemporary or even near-contem- 
porary scientific thinker. Two remarkable instances at once 
come to mind of Americans who have won the highest distinc- " 
tion abroad yet remain unknown by name to many of their 
most cultivated compatriots. Who has ever heard of Willard 
Gibbs? Yet he was the recipient of the Copley medal, British 
learning's highest honour, and his phase rule is said to mark an 
epoch in the progress of physical chemistry. Again, prior to 
the Nobel prize award, who outside academic bowers had ever 
heard of the crucial experiment by which a Chicago physicist 
showed, to quote Poincare, " that the physical procedures are 
powerless to put in evidence absolute motion "? Michelson's 
name is linked with all the recent speculations on relativity, 
and he shares with Einstein the fate of finding himself famous 
one fine morning through the force of purely external circum- 
stances. 

In even the briefest and most random enumeration of tower- 
ing native sons it is impossible to ignore the name of William 
James. Here for once the suffrage of town and gown, of do- 
mestic and alien judges, is unanimous. Naturally James can 
never mean quite the same to the European world that he 
means to us, because in the United States he is far more than a 
great psychologist, philosopher, or literary man. Owing to our 
peculiar spiritual history, he occupies in our milieu an alto- 
gether unique position. His is the solitary example of an 
American pre-eminent in a branch of science who at the same 



SCIENCE I S3 

time succeeded in deeply affecting the cultural life of a whole 
generation. Further, he is probably the only one of our gen- 
uinely original men to be thoroughly saturated with the es- 
sense of old world civilization. On the other side of the At- 
lantic, of course, neither of these characteristics would confer 
a patent of distinction. Foreign judgment of James's psycho- 
logical achievement was consequently not coloured by exter- 
nal considerations, and it is all the more remarkable that 
the " Principles of Psychology" was so widely and by 
such competent critics acclaimed as a synthesis of the first 
order. 

Without attempting to exhaust the roster of great names, I 
must mention Simon Newcomb and his fellow-astronomer, 
George W. Hill, both Copley medallists. Newcomb, in par- 
ticular, stood out as the foremost representative of his science 
in this country, honoured here and abroad alike for his ab- 
struse original researches into the motion of the moon and 
the planetary system and for his effective popularization. 
Henry Augustus Rowland, the physicist, was another of our 
outstanding men — one, incidentally, whose measure was taken 
in Europe long before his greatness dawned upon his col- 
leagues at home. He is celebrated, among other things, for 
perfecting an instrument of precision and for a new and more 
accurate determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat. 
Among geologists Grove Karl Gilbert, famous for his explora- 
tion of Lake Bonneville — the major forerunner of Great Salt 
Lake — and his investigations of mountain structure, stands 
forth as one of our pre-eminent savants. Even those who, like 
the present writer, enjoyed merely casual contact with that 
grand old man could not fail to gain the impression that now 
they knew what a great scientist looked like in the flesh and to 
feel that such a one would be a fit member of any intellectual 
galaxy an5rwhere. 

If from single individuals we turn to consider currents of 
scientific thought, the United States again stands the trial with 
flying colours. It can hardly be denied that in a number 
of branches our countrymen are marching in the vanguard. 
" Experimental biology," said a German zoologist some time 
before the War, " is pre-eminently an American science." 



154 CIVILIZATION 

Certainly one need merely glance at German or British man- 
uals to learn how deeply interpretations of basic evolutionary 
phenomena have been affected by the work of Professor T. 
H. Morgan and his followers. In psychology it is true that no 
one wears the mantle of William James, but there is effective 
advancement along a number of distinct lines. Thorndike's 
tests marked an era in the annals of animal psychology, sup- 
planting with a saner technique the slovenly work of earlier 
investigators. Experimental investigation of mental phenom- 
ena generally, of individual variability and behaviour in par- 
ticular, flourishes in a number of academic centres. In an- 
thropology the writings of Lewis H. Morgan have proved a 
tremendous stimulus to sociological speculation the world over 
and still retain their hold on many European thinkers. They 
were not, in my opinion, the product of a great intellect and 
the scheme of evolution traced by Morgan is doomed to aban- 
donment. Yet his theories have suggested a vast amount of 
thought and to his lasting credit it must be said that he opened 
up an entirely new and fruitful field of recondite research 
through his painstaking accumulation and discussion of primi- 
tive kinship terminologies. 

More recently the anthropological school headed by Profes- 
sor Boas has led to a transvaluation of theoretical values in 
the study of cultural development, supplanting with a sounder 
historical insight the cruder evolutionary speculation of the 
past. Above all, its founder has succeeded in perfecting the 
methodology of every division of the vast subject, and remains 
probably the only anthropologist in the world who has both 
directly and indirectly furthered ethnological, linguistic, soma- 
tological and archaeological investigation. Finally, the active 
part played by pathologists like Dr. Simon Flexner in the ex- 
perimental study of disease is too well known to require more 
than brief mention. 

Either in its individual or collective results, American re- 
search is thus very far from being a negligible factor in the 
scientific life of the world. Nevertheless, the medal has a re- 
verse side, and he would be a bold optimist who should sin- 
cerely voice complete contentment either with the status of 
science in the cultural polity of the nation or with the work 



SCIENCE iss 

achieved by the average American investigator. Let us, then, 
try to face the less flattering facts in the case. 

The fundamental difficulty can be briefly summarized by 
applying the sociologist's concept of maladjustment. American 
science, notwithstanding its notable achievements, is not an or- 
ganic product of our soil; it is an epiphenomenon, a hothouse 
growth. It is still the prerogative of a caste, not a treasure in 
which the nation glories. We have at best only a nascent class 
of cultivated laymen who relish scientific books requiring con- 
centrated thought or supplying large bodies of fact. This is 
shown most clearly by the rarity of articles of this type even 
in our serious magazines. Our physicians, lawyers, clergy- 
men and journalists — in short, our educated classes — do not 
encourage the publication of reading-matter which is issued in 
Europe as a profitable business venture. It is hard to con- 
ceive of a book like Mach's " Analyse der Empfindungen " 
running through eight editions in the United States. Con- 
versely, it is not strange that hardly any of our first-rate men 
find it an alluring task to seek an understanding with a larger 
audience. Newcomb and James are of course remarkable ex- 
ceptions, but they are exceptions. Here again the contrast 
with European conditions is glaring. Not to mention the 
classic popularizers of the past, England, e.g., can boast even 
to-day of such men as Pearson, Soddy, Joly,^Hinks — all of 
them competent or even distinguished in their professional 
work yet at the same time skilful interpreters of their field to 
a wider public. But for a healthy cultural life a rapport of 
this sort between creator and appreciator is an indispensable 
prerequisite, and it is not a whit less important in science than 
in music or poetry. 

The estrangement of science from its social environment has 
produced anomalies almost inconceivable in the riper civiliza- 
tions of the Old World. Either the scientist loses contact with 
his surroundings or in the struggle for survival he adapts him- 
self by a surrender of his individuality, that is, by more or less 
disingenuously parading as a lowbrow and representing him- 
self as a dispenser of worldly goods. It is quite true that, his- 
torically, empirical knowledge linked with practical needs is 
earlier than rational science; it is also true that applied and 



156 CIVILIZATION 

pure science can be and have been mutual benefactors. This 
lesson is an important one and in a country with a scholastic 
tradition like Germany it was one that men like Mach and Ost- 
wald did well to emphasize. But in an age and country where 
philosophers pique themselves on ignoring philosophical prob- 
lems and psychologists have become experts in advertising tech- 
nique, the emphasis ought surely to be in quite the opposite 
direction, and that, even if one inclines in general to a utili- 
tarian point of view. For nothing is more certain than that a 
penny-wise Gradgrind policy is a pound-foolish one. A friend 
teaching in one of our engineering colleges tells me that owing 
to the " practical " training received there the graduates are 
indeed able to apply formulae by rote but flounder helplessly 
when confronted by a new situation, which drives them to seek 
counsel with the despised and underpaid " theoretical " pro- 
fessor. The plea for pure science offered by Rowland in 1883 
is not yet altogether antiquated in 1921: " To have the appli- 
cations of a science, the science itself must exist ... we have 
taken the science of the Old World, and applied it to all our 
uses, accepting it like the rain of heaven, without asking whence 
it came, or even acknowledging the debt of gratitude we owe 
to the great and unselfish workers who have given it to us. . . . 
To a civilized nation of the present day, the applications of 
science are a necessity, and our country has hitherto succeeded 
in this line, only for the reason that there are certain countries 
in the world where pure science has been and is cultivated, and 
where the study of nature is considered a noble pursuit." 

The Bceotian disdain for research as a desirable pursuit is 
naturally reflected in the mediocre encouragement doled out 
to investigators, who are obliged to do their work by hook or 
by crook and to raise funds by the undignified cajolery of 
wealthy patrons and a disingenuous argumentum ad hominem. 
Heaven forbid that money be appropriated to attack a problem 
which, in the opinion of the best experts, calls for solution; 
effort must rather be diverted to please an ignorant benefactor 
bent on establishing a pet theory or fired with the zeal to 
astound the world by a sensational discovery. 

Another aspect of scientific life in the United States that 
reflects the general cultural conditions is the stress placed on 



SCIENCE 157 

organization and administration as opposed to individual ef- 
fort. It is quite true that for the prosecution of elaborate in- 
vestigations careful allotment of individual tasks contributory 
to the general end is important and sometimes even indispens- 
able. But some of the greatest work in the history of science 
has been achieved without regard for the principles of business 
efficiency; and whatever advantage may accrue in the future 
from administrative devices is negligible in comparison with 
the creative thought of scientific men. These, and only these, 
can lend value to the machinery of organization, which inde- 
pendently of them must remain a soulless instrument. The 
overweighting of efficiency schemes as compared to creative 
personalities is only a symptom of a general maladjustment. 
Intimately related with this feature is that cynical flouting of 
intellectual values that appears in the customary attitude of 
trustees and university presidents towards those who shed 
lustre on our academic life. The professional pre-eminence 
of a scientist may be admitted by the administrative officials 
but it is regarded as irrelevant since the standard of values ac- 
cepted by them is only remotely, if at all, connected with orig- 
inality or learning. 

There are, of course, scientists to whom deference is paid 
even by trustees, nay, by the wives of trustees; but it will be 
usually found that they are men of independent means or social 
prestige. It is, in other words, their wealth and position, not 
their creative work, that raises them above their fellows. One 
of the most lamentable results of this contempt for higher 
values is the failure to provide for ample leisure that might be 
devoted to research. The majority of our scientists, like those 
abroad, gain a livelihood by teaching, but few foreign ob- 
servers fail to be shocked by the way the energies of their 
American colleagues are frittered away on administrative 
routine and elementary instruction till neither time nor strength 
remains for the advancement of knowledge. But even this does 
not tell the whole story, for we must remember that the 
younger scientists are as a rule miserably underpaid and are 
obliged to eke out a living by popular writing or lecturing, so 
that research becomes a sheer impossibility. If Ostwald and 
Cattail are right in associating the highest productivity with 



158 CIVILIZATION 

the earlier years of maturity, the tragic effects of such condi- 
tions as I have just described are manifest. 

In justice, however, mention must be made of a number of 
institutions permitting scientific work without imposing any 
obhgation to teach or onerous administrative duties. The U. 
S. Geological Survey, the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller 
Institute may serve as examples. We must likewise remember 
that different individuals react quite differently to the neces- 
sity for teaching. Some of the most noted investigators — Row- 
land, for instance — find a moderate amount of lecturing posi- 
tively stimulating. In a Utopian republic of learning such in- 
dividual variations would be carefully considered in the allot- 
ment of tasks. The association of the Lick Observatory with 
the University of California seems to approximate to ideal con- 
ditions, inasmuch as its highly trained astronomers are relieved 
of all academic duties but enjoy the privilege of lecturing to 
the students when the spirit moves them. 

To return to the main question, the maladjustment between 
the specific scientific phase of our civilization and the general 
cultural life produces certain effects even more serious than 
those due to penury, administrative tyranny, and popular in- 
difference, for they are less potent and do not so readily evoke 
defence-mechanisms on the victims' part. There is, first of 
all, a curtailment of potential scientific achievement through 
the general deficiencies of the cultural environment. 

Much has been said by both propagandists and detractors 
of German scholarship about the effects of intensive specializa- 
tion. But an important feature commonly ignored in this con- 
nection is that in the country of its origin specialization is a 
concomitant and successor of a liberal education. Whatever 
strictures may be levelled at the traditional form of this pre- 
paratory training — and I have seen it criticized as severely by 
German writers as by any — the fact remains that the German 
university student has a broad cultural background such as his 
American counterpart too frequently lacks; and what is true 
of Germany holds with minor qualifications for other Euro- 
pean countries. 

A trivial example will serve to illustrate the possible ad- 
vantages of a cultural foundation for very specialized research. 



SCIENCE 159 

Music is notoriously one of the salient features of German 
culture, not merely because Germany has produced great com- 
posers but because of the wide appreciation and quite general 
study of music. Artistically the knowledge of the piano or 
violin acquired by the average child in the typical German 
home may count for naught, yet in at least two branches of 
inquiry it may assume importance. The psychological aspect 
of acoustics is likely to attract and to be fruitfully cultivated 
by those conversant with musical technique, and they alone 
will be capable of grappling with the comparative problems 
presented by the study of primitive music — problems that 
would never occur to the average Anglo-Saxon field ethnologist, 
yet to which the German would apply his knowledge as spon- 
taneously as he applies the multiplication table to a practical 
matter of everyday purchase. 

As a matter of fact, all the phenomena of the universe are 
interrelated and, accordingly, the most important advances may 
be expected from a revelation of the less patent connections. 
For this purpose a diversity of interests with corresponding 
variety of information may be not only a favourable condition 
but a prerequisite. Helmholtz may have made an indifferent 
physician; but because he combined a medical practitioner's 
knowledge with that of a physicist he was enabled to devise the 
ophthalmoscope. So it may be that not one out of ten thou- 
sand men who might apply themselves to higher mathematics 
would ever be able to advance mathematical theory, but it is 
certainly true that the manipulatory skill acquired would stand 
them in good stead not only in the exact sciences but in biology, 
psychology, and anthropometry, in all of which the theory of 
probability can be effectively applied to the phenomenon of 
variability. 

I do not mean to assert that the average European student 
is an Admirable Crichton utilizing with multidexterity the most 
diverse methods of research and groups of fact. But I am 
convinced that many European workers produce more valu- 
able work than equally able Americans for the sole reason that 
the European's social heritage provides him with agencies 
ready-made for detecting correlations that must inevitably 
elude a vision narrower because deprived of the same artificial 



i6o CIVILIZATION 

aid. The remedy lies in enriching the cultural atmosphere and 
in insisting on a broad educational training over and above 
that devoted to the specialist's craftsmanship. 

Important, however, as variety of information and interests 
doubtless are, one factor must take precedence in the scientist's 
equipment — the spirit in which he approaches his scientific 
work as a whole. In this respect the point that would prob- 
ably strike most European or, at all events, Continental scien- 
tists is the rarity in America of philosophical inquiries into 
the foundations of one's scientific position. The contrast with 
German culture is of course sharp, and in many Teutonic 
works the national bent for epistemological discussion is un- 
doubtedly carried to a point where it ceases to be palatable to 
those not to the manner born. Yet this tendency has a salu- 
tary effect in stimulating that contempt for mere authority 
which is indispensable for scientific progress. What our aver- 
age American student should acquire above all is a stout faith 
in the virtues of reasoned nonconjormism, and in this phrase 
adjective and noun are equally significant. On one hand, we 
must condemn the blind deference with which too many of 
our investigators accept the judgments of acknowledged great- 
ness. What can be more ridiculous, e.g., than to make dogmas 
of the obiter dicta of a man like William James, the chief 
lesson of whose life is a resentment of academic traditionalism? 
Or, what shall we think of a celebrated biologist who decides 
the problem of Lamarckianism by a careful weighing not of 
arguments but of authorities? No one can approve of the 
grim ferocity, reminiscent of the literary feuds of Alexander 
Pope, with which German savants sometimes debate problems 
of theoretic interest. Yet even such billingsgate as Diihrring 
levelled at Helmholtz is preferable to obsequious discipleship. 
It testifies, at all events, to the glorious belief that in the 
republic of learning fame and position count for naught, that 
the most illustrious scientist shall not be free from the criticism 
of the meanest Privatdozent. But the nonconformism should 
be rational. It is infantile to cling to leading-strings but it is 
no less childish to thrust out one's tongue at doctrines that 
happen to disagree with those of one's own clique. Indeed^ 
frequently both forms of puerility are combined: it is easy to 



SCIENCE i6i 

sneer with James at Wundt or to assault the selectionists under 
cover of De Vries's mutationism. A mature thinker will forego 
the short and easy but misleading road. Following Fechner, 
he will be cautious in his belief but equally cautious in his dis- 
belief. 

It is only such spiritual freedom that makes the insistence 
on academic freedom a matter worth fighting for. After all, 
what is the use of a man's teaching what he pleases, if he quite 
sincerely retails the current folk-lore? In one of the most re- 
markable chapters of the " Mechanik " Ernst Mach points out 
that the detriment to natural philosophy due to the political 
power of the Church is easily exaggerated. Science was re- 
tarded primarily not because scientists were driven by outward 
compulsion to spread such and such views but because they un- 
critically swallowed the cud of folk-belief. Voild rennemi! 
In the insidious influence of group opinions, whether counte- 
nanced by Church, State or a scientific hierarchy, lies the basic 
peril. The philosophic habit of unremitting criticism of one's 
basic assumptions is naturally repugnant to a young and naive 
culture, and it cannot be expected to spring up spontaneously 
and flower luxuriantly in science while other departments of 
life fail to yield it nurture. Every phase of our civilization 
must be saturated with that spirit of positive scepticism which 
Goethe and Huxley taught before science can reap a full har- 
vest in her own field. But her votaries, looking back upon 
the history of science, may well be emboldened to lead in the 
battle, and if the pioneers in the movement should fail they 
may well console themselves with Milton's hero: ". . . and 
that strife was not inglorious, though the event was dire! " 

Robert H. Lowie 



PHILOSOPHY 

PHILOSOPHY is at once a product of civilization and a 
stimulus to its development. It is the solvent in which 
the inarticulate and conflicting aspirations of a people become 
clarified and from which they derive directing force. Since, 
however, philosophers are likely to clothe their thoughts in 
highly technical language, there is need of a class of middle- 
men-interpreters through whom philosophy penetrates the 
masses. By American tradition, the philosophers have been 
professors; the interpreters, clergymen. Professors are likely 
to be deflected by the ideas embodied in the institutions with 
which they associate themselves. The American college, in its 
foundations, was designated a protector of orthodoxy and still 
echoes what Santayana has so aptly called the " genteel tradi- 
tion," the tradition that the teacher must defend the faith. 
Some of the most liberal New England colleges even now de- 
mand attendance at daily chapel and Sunday church. Less 
than a quarter of a century ago, one could still find, among 
major non-sectarian institutions, the clergyman-president, him- 
self a teacher, crowning the curriculum with a senior require- 
ment, Christian Evidences, in support of the Faith. 

The nineteenth century organized a vigorous war against this 
genteel tradition. Not only were the attacks of rationalism 
on dogma reinforced by the ever-mounting tide of scientific 
discovery within our institutions of learning, but also the news 
of these scientific discoveries began to stir the imagination of 
the public, and to carry the conflict of science and theology 
beyond the control of the church-college. The greatest leaven 
was Darwin's " Origin of Species," of which two American 
editions were announced as early as i860, one year after its 
publication in England. The dogma of science came publicly 
to confront the dogma of theology. Howsoever conservative 
the college, it had to yield to the new intellectual temper and 
the capitulation was facilitated by the army of young pro- 

163 



1 64 CIVILIZATION 

fessors whom cheapened transportation and the rumour of 
great achievements led to the universities of Germany, 

From the point of view of popular interest, the immediate 
effects of these pilgrimages were not wholly advantageous to 
philosophy. In losing something of their American provin- 
cialism, these pilgrims also lost their hold on American inter- 
ests. The problems that they brought back were rooted in a 
foreign soil and tradition. To students they appeared arti- 
ficial and barren displays of technical skill. Thus an academic 
philosophy of professordom arose, the more lonely through the 
loss of the ecclesiastical mediators of the earlier tradition. 
But here and there American vitality showed through its for- 
eign clothes and gradually an assimilation took place, the more 
easily, perhaps^ since German idealism naturally sustains the 
genteel tradition and thrives amid the modes of thought that 
Emerson had developed independently and for which his lit- 
erary gifts had obtained a following. 

Wherever New England has constituted the skeletal muscles 
of philosophic culture, its temper has remained unchanged. 
Calvinism was brought to America because it suited this tem- 
per, and the history of idealism in America is the history of 
its preservation by adaptation to a changing environment of 
ideas. Its marks are a sense of the presence of the Divine in 
experience and a no less strong sense of inevitable evil. Jona- 
than Edwards writes, " When we behold the light and bright- 
ness of the sun, the golden edges of an evening cloud, or the 
beauteous bow, we behold the adumbrations of His glory and 
goodness; and in the blue sky, of his mildness and gentleness. 
There are also many things wherein we may behold His awful 
majesty: in the sun in his strength, in comets, in thunder, 
with the lowering thunder-clouds, in ragged rocks and the 
brows of mountains." Emerson's version is: "Nature is al- 
ways consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own 
laws. . . . She arms and equips an animal to find it place 
and living in the earth, and at the same time she arms and 
equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide 
creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few 
feathers she gives him a petty omnipresence. . . . Nature is 
the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as 



PHILOSOPHY i6s 

ice becomes water and gas. Every moment instructs and 
every object; for wisdom is infused into every form." And 
Royce's: " When they told us in childhood that we could not 
see God just because he was everywhere, just because his 
omnipresence gave us no chance to discern him and to fix our 
eyes upon him, they told us a deep truth in allegorical fash- 
ion. . . . The Self is so little a thing merely guessed at as the 
unknown source of experience, that already, in the very least 
of daily experiences, you unconsciously know him as some- 
thing present." 

In its darker aspect this temper gives us Edwards's " Sin- 
ners in the Hands of an Angry God," whose choices we may 
not fathom. But Emerson is not far behind: "Great men, 
great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but per- 
ceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to 
face it. . . . At Lisbon, an earthquake killed men like flies. 
At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand persons were crushed 
in a few minutes. Etc. . . . Providence has a wild, rough, 
incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to white- 
wash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that ter- 
rific benefactor in the clean shirt and white neckcloth of a stu- 
dent of divinity." For Royce, " the worst tragedy of the 
world is the tragedy of the brute chance to which everything 
spiritual seems to be subject amongst us — the tragedy of the 
diabolical irrationality of so many among the foes of what- 
ever is significant." 

Emersonian philosophy fails in two respects to satisfy the 
demands of the puritanical temperament upon contemporary 
thought. In building altars to the " Beautiful Necessity," 
it neglects to assimilate the discoveries of science, and it de- 
taches itself from the Christian tradition within which alone 
this spirit feels at home. Both of these defects are met by the 
greatest of American idealists, Professor Royce. 

In character and thought Royce is the great reconciler of 
contradictions. Irrational in his affections, and at his best 
in the society of children, he stands for the absolute authority 
of reason; filled with indignation at wrong and injustice, he 
explains the presence of evil as an essential condition for the 
good; keenly critical and not optimistic as to the concrete char- 



1 66 CIVILIZATION 

acters of men, he presents man as the image of God, a part of 
the self-representative system through which the Divine na- 
ture unfolds itself. Never was there a better illustration of 
Pascal's dictum that we use our reasons to support what we 
already believe, not to attain conclusions. And never was 
there greater self-deception as to the presence of this 
process. 

What man not already convinced of an Absolute could find 
in error the proof of a deeper self that knows in unity all truth? 
Who else could accept the dilemma " either . . . your real 
world yonder is through and through a world of ideas, an outer 
mind that you are more or less comprehending through your 
experience, or else, in so far as it is real and outer, it is un- 
knowable, an inscrutable X, an absolute mystery "? Without 
the congeniality of belief, where is the thrill in assimilating 
self-consciousness as infinite to a greater Infinite, as the infi- 
nite systems of even numbers, or of odd numbers, or an in- 
finity of other infinite series can be assimilated to the greater 
infinity of the whole number series as proper parts? Yet 
Royce has been able to clothe these doctrines with vast erudi- 
tion and flashes of quaint humour, helped out by a prolix and 
somewhat desultory memory, and give them life. 

By virtue of the obscurantist logic inherent in this as in 
other transcendental idealisms, there is a genuine attachment 
to a certain aspect of Christianity. The identification of the 
Absolute with the Logos of John in his " Spirit of Modern 
Philosophy " and the frequent lapses into Scriptural language 
are not mere tricks to inspire abstractions with the breath of 
life. By such logic " selves " are never wholly distinct. If 
we make classifications, they are all secundum quid. Abso- 
lute ontological sundering is as mythical as the Snark. The 
individual is essentially a member of a community of selves 
that establishes duties for him under the demands of Loyalty. 
This is the basis of Royce's ethics. But the fellowship in 
this community is also a participation in the " beloved com- 
munity " within which sin, atonement, and the dogma of 
Pauline Christianity unfold themselves naturally in the guise 
of social psychology. In such treatment of the " Problem 
of Christianity " there is at most only a slight shifting of 



PHILOSOPHY 167 

emphasis from the somewhat too self-conscious individualism 
of his earliest philosophy. 

Royce used to tell a story on himself that illustrates a re- 
action of a part of the public to idealistic philosophy. At 
the close of a lecture before a certain woman's organization, 
one of his auditors approached him with the words: " Oh, my 
dear Professor Royce, I did enjoy your lectures so much! Of 
course, I didn't understand one word of it, but it was so evi- 
dent you understood it all, that it made it very enjoyable! " 
The lady, though more frank in her confession, was probably 
not intellectually inferior to a considerable portion of the ideal- 
ist's public. James notes the fascination of hearing high things 
talked about, even if one cannot understand. But time is, 
al?.s, productive of comparative understanding, and it may be 
with Royce, as with Emerson before him, that growth of un- 
derstanding contributes to narrowing the circle of his readers. 
The imported mysteries of Eucken and Bergson offer newer 
thrills, and a fuller sense of keeping up to date. 

If Royce's philosophy of religion has not the success that 
might have been anticipated among those seeking a freer reli- 
gion, it is probably, as Professor Hocking suggests, because 
" idealism does not do the work of religious truth." Royce 
has no interest in churches or sects. Christ is for him little 
more than a shadow. Prayer and worship find no place in 
his discussion. The mantle of the genteel tradition must then 
fall on other shoulders, probably those of Hocking himself. 
His " Meaning of God in Human Experience " is an effort to 
unite realism, mysticism, and idealism to establish Christianity 
as " organically rooted in passion, fact, and institutional life." 
Where idealism has destroyed the fear of Hell, this new inter- 
pretation " restores the sense of infinite hazard, a wrath to 
come, a heavenly city to be gained or lost in the process of time 
and by the use of our freedom "! 

In this philosophy, we ask, what has religion done for hu- 
manity and how has it operated? Its effects appear in " the 
basis of such certainties as we have, our self-respect, our belief 
in human worth, our faith in the soul's stability through all 
catastrophes of physical nature, and in the integrity of his- 
tory." But if we accept this " mass of actual deed, once and 



1 68 CIVILIZATION 

for all accomplished under the assurance of historic religion " 
and through the medium of religious dogma and practice, does 
this guarantee the future importance of religion? Much has 
been accomplished under the conception that the earth was 
flat, but the conception is nevertheless not valid. 

It is too soon to estimate the depth of impression that this 
philosophy will make on American culture. Professor Hock- 
ing warns us against hastening to judge that the world is 
becoming irreligious. He believes that the current distaste 
for the language of orthodoxy may spring from the opposite 
reason, that man is becoming potentially more religious. If 
so, this fact may conspire with the American tradition of the 
church-college to verify Professor Cohen's assertion that " the 
idealistic tradition still is and perhaps will long continue to be 
the prevailing basis of philosophic instruction in America." 
But there are signs that point to an opposite conclusion and 
the means of emancipation are at hand both in a change of 
popular spirit and within philosophy itself. 

The economic and social conditions that scattered the more 
adventurous of the New Englanders through the developing 
West, and the tides of immigration of the 19th century, have 
weakened the hold of the Calvinistic spirit. These events, and 
scientific education, are producing a generation that can look 
upon the beauties of nature, be moved to enjoyment, admira- 
tion, and wonder by them without, on that account, feeling 
themselves in the presence of a supernatural Divine principle. 
Success in mastering nature has overcome the feeling of help- 
lessness in the presence of misfortune. It breeds optimists of 
intelligence. To a cataclysm such as the San Francisco earth- 
quake, it replies with organized relief and reconstruction in 
reinforced concrete. If pestilence appears, it seeks the germ, 
an antitoxin, and sanitary measures. There are no longer 
altars built to the Beautiful Necessity. 

Within philosophy, the most radical expression of this atti- 
tude appears in the New Realism, and in the instrumentalism of 
Dewey. In 1910, six of the younger American philosophers 
issued in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scien- 
tific Method " The Programme and First Platform of Six 
Realists," followed shortly by a co-operative volume of studies 



PHILOSOPHY 169 

to elaborate the doctrine. Their deepest bond of union is a 
distaste for the romantic spirit and obscurantist logic of Abso- 
lute Idealism. Hence their dominant idea is to cut at tdie 
very foundations of this system, the theory of relations in gen- 
eral, and the relation of idea and object in particular. Young 
America is not fond of the subtleties of history, hence these 
realists take their stand upon the " unimpeachable truth of 
the accredited results of science " at a time when, by the irony 
of history, science herself has begun to doubt. 

To thwart idealism, psychology must be rewritten. While 
consciousness exists there is always the chance that our world 
of facts may fade into subjective presentations. Seizing a 
fruitful suggestion of James', they introduce us to a world of 
objects that exists quite independently of being known. The 
relations of these objects are external to them and independent 
of their character. Sometimes, however, there arise relations 
between our organisms and other objects that can best be 
described by asserting that these objects have entered into 
our consciousness. How then can we fall into error? Only 
as nature makes mistakes, by reacting in a way that brings 
conflict with unnoted conditions. Perhaps the greatest con- 
tribution of Realism as yet to American thought is the con- 
tribution of some of its apostles to its implicit psychology, 
already independently established as behaviourism, the most 
vital movement in contemporary psychology. 

The highly technical form of the Six Realists' co-operative 
volume has kept their doctrine from any great reading public. 
But in its critical echoes, the busy American finds a sympa- 
thetic note in the assertion of the independent reality of the 
objects with which he works and the world in which he has 
to make his way. His also is practical faith in science, and 
he is glad to escape an inevitable type of religion and moral 
theory to be swallowed along with philosophy. Until the New 
Realists, however, develop further implications of their theory, 
or at least present congenial religious, moral, and social atti- 
tudes, their philosophy has only the negative significance of 
release. If it is going to take a deep hold on life, it must 
also be creative, not replacing dogma by dogma, but elabo- 
rating some new world vision. As yet it has told us little 



170 CIVILIZATION 

more than that truth, goodness, and beauty are independent 
realities, eternal subsistencies that await our discovery. 

Professor Perry has outlined a realistic morality. For him 
a right action is any that conduces to goodness and whatever 
fulfils an interest is good. But a good action is not necessarily 
moral. Morality requires the fulfilment of the greatest pos- 
sible number of interests, under the given circumstances; the 
highest good, if attainable, would be an action fulfilling all pos- 
sible interests. This doctrine, though intelligible, is hard to 
apply in specific instances. In it realism dissolves into prag- 
matism, and its significance can best be seen in connection with 
that philosophy, where it has received fuller development and 
concrete applications. 

Pragmatism obtained its initial impulse through a mind in 
temper between the sturdy common sense of the New Realists 
and the emotionalistic romanticism of the Idealists, or rather 
comprehending both within itself. This mind is that of Wil- 
liam James, the last heir of the line of pure New England cul- 
ture, made cosmopolitan by travel and intellectual contacts. 
Of Swedenborgian family, skilled alike in science and art, 
James lived the mystical thrills of the unknown but could han- 
dle them with the shrewdness of a Yankee trader. With 
young America, his gaze is directed toward the future, and 
with it, he is impatient of dogma and restraint. He is free 
from conventions of thought and action with the freedom of 
those who have lived them all in their ancestry and dare to face 
realities without fear of social or intellectual jaux pas. With 
such new-found freedom goes a vast craving for experience. 
For him, the deepest realities are the personal experiences of 
individual men. 

James' greatest contribution is his " Psychology." In it he 
places himself in the stream of human experience, ruthlessly 
cutting the gordian knots of psychological dogma and conven- 
tions. The mind that he reports is the mind each of us sees 
in himself. It is not so much a science of psychology as the 
materials for such a science, a science in its descriptive stage, 
constantly interrupted by shrewd homilies wherein habit ap- 
pears as the fly-wheel of society, or our many selves enlarge 
the scope of sympathetic living. Nor is it congenial to this 



PHILOSOPHY 171 

adventurer in experience that his explorations should constrain 
human nature within a scientist's map. Not only must the 
stream of consciousness flow between the boundaries of our 
concepts, but also in the human will there is a point, be it 
ever so small, where a " we," too real ever to be comprehended 
by science or philosophy, can dip down into the stream of 
consciousness and delay some fleeting idea, be it only for the 
twinkling of an eye, and thereby change the whole course and 
significance of our overt action. Freedom must not unequivo- 
cally surrender to scientific determinism, or chance to necessity. 

James is a Parsifal to whom the Grail is never quite re- 
vealed. His pragmatism and radical empiricism are but meth- 
ods of exploration and no adventure is too puny or mean for 
the quest. We must make our ideas clear and test them by the 
revelation they produce. Thoughts that make no difference 
to us in living are not real thoughts, but imaginings. The way 
is always open and perhaps there is a guiding truth, a work- 
ing value, in the operations of even the deranged mind. We 
must entertain the ecstatic visions of saints, the alleged com- 
munications of spiritualists, mystical contacts with sources of 
some higher power, and even the thought-systems of cranks, 
that nothing be lost or untried. Not that we need share such 
beliefs, but they are genuine experiences and who can foretell 
where in experiences some fruitful vision may arise! 

As a psychologist, James knew that the significance of a 
belief lies not so much in its content as in its power to direct 
the energies it releases. His catholic interests are not equiva- 
lent to uncritical credulity. Santayana, the wisest of his critics, 
is right in his assertion that James never lost his agnosticism: 
" He did not really believe ; he merely believed in the right 
of believing that you might be right if you believed." As for 
Pascal, the wager on immortality might be worth the making 
for if one won there was the blessedness of Heaven, and if one 
lost — at least there should have been a sustaining optimism 
through the trials of this life. Communion with the infinite 
might open new sources of power. If so, the power was there. 
If not, no harm had been done by the trial. Yet there is no 
evidence in James' philosophy that he himself drew inspira- 
tion from any of such sources. 



172 CIVILIZATION 

If James has drawn to himself the greatest reading public 
of all American philosophers, it is because in him each man 
can find the sanction for himself. Without dogmatism or 
pedantry, James is the voice of all individual human experi- 
ences. In him, each man can find a sympathetic auditor, and 
words vivid with the language of the street, encouraging his 
endeavours or at least pointing out the significance of his ex- 
periences for the great business of living. Sometimes James 
listens to human confessions with a suppressed cry of pain and 
recalls wistfully " A Certain Blindness in Human Beings," or 
asks " Is Life Worth Living? " Once with indignation at " the 
delicate intellectualities and subtleties and scrupulosities " of 
philosophy he confronts " the host of guileless thoroughfed 
thinkers " with the radical realities of Morrison I. Swift, only 
to partially retract a few pages later with the admission, for 
him grudgingly given, that the Absolute may afford its believ- 
ers a certain comfort and is " in so far forth " true. We live 
after all in an open universe, the lid is off and time relentlessly 
operates for the production of novelties. No empiricist can 
give a decision until the evidence is all in, and in the nature 
of the case this can never happen. 

Such openness of interest forefends the possibility of James' 
founding a school of philosophy. It also renders all his 
younger contemporaries in some measure his disciples. Popu- 
larly he is the refuge of the mystics and heterodox, the spir- 
itualists and the cranks who seek the sanction of academic 
scholarship and certified dignity. There are more things in 
the philosophies of these who call him master than are dreamed 
of in his philosophy. In academic philosophy there is a dual 
descent of the James tradition. As a principle of negative 
criticism, it may be turned into its opposite, as with Hocking, 
who enunciates the extreme form of the pragmatic principle, 
If a theory is not interesting, it is false — and utilizes it for 
his realistic, mystic, idealistic absolutism. The philosophy of 
Henri Bergson, that has been widely read in this country, 
reinforces this mystical spiritual side, but American mysti- 
cism has popularly tended to degenerate into the occultisms of 
second-rate credulous minds. 



PHILOSOPHY 173 

On the other hand, for those in whom the conflict of science 
and rehgion is settling itself on the side of science, the principle 
of pragmatism lends itself to the interpretation originally in- 
tended by Charles Peirce, the author of the term, as an ex- 
perimentalism, a search for verifiable hypotheses after the 
manner of the sciences. But this side of the doctrine is the 
one that has been developed by John Dewey. 

Professor Dewey is without question the leading American 
philosopher, both from the thoroughness of his analyses and 
the vigour of his appeal to the American public. In discarding 
the Hegelian Idealism in which he was trained, he is thoroughly 
aligned with the New America. In him science has wholly 
won, and although of New England, Vermont, ancestry, there 
remains not a trace of the New Englander's romantic spiritual 
longings for contact with a vast unknown. His dogmatic 
faiths, and no man is without such faiths, relate to evolution, 
democracy, and the all-decisive authority of experience. 

For Dewey, as for the Realists, psychology is the study of 
human behaviour. For him mind is the instrument by which 
we overcome obstacles and thinking takes place only when 
action is checked. Hence in the conventional sense there are 
no abstractions. Our concepts are instruments by which we 
take hold of reality. If we need instruments to manufacture 
instruments, or to facilitate their use, these instruments are 
also concepts. We may call them abstract, but they are not 
thereby removed from the realm of experienced fact. Since, 
therefore, our real interest is not in things as they are in them- 
selves, but in what we can do with them, our judgments are 
judgments of value, and value is determined by practice. Such 
judgments imply an incomplete physical situation and look 
toward its completion. But the will to believe is gone. There 
is no shadow of James' faith in the practicality of emotional 
satisfactions, or in his voluntaristic psychology. Our " sen- 
sations are not the elements out of which perceptions are 
composed, constituted, or constructed; they are the finest, 
most carefully discriminated objects of perception." Early 
critics, particularly among the realists, have accused Dewey 
of subjectivism, but except in the sense that an individual 



174 CIVILIZATION 

must be recognized as one term in the reaction to a situation, 
and the realists themselves do this, there is no ground for the 
charge. 

Such a philosophy as Dewey's is nothing if it is not put to 
work. And here is his greatest hold on American life. Like 
most Americans, he has no sympathy for the lazy, and even 
the over-reflective may suffer from the contamination of sloth; 
the true American wants to see results, and here is a philosophy 
in which results are the supreme end. Reform is, for Amer- 
ica, a sort of sport and this philosophy involves nothing but 
reform. Metaphysical subtleties and visions leave the busy 
man cold; here they are taboo. 

Professor Dewey puts his philosophy to work in the fields 
of ethics and education. Perhaps his ethics is the least satis- 
factory, howsoever promising its beginnings. Moral codes 
become the expression of group-approval. But they easily 
pass into tradition, get out of touch with fact, are superan- 
nuated. The highest virtue is intelligence and with intelli- 
gence one can recognize the uniqueness of every moral situation 
and develop from it its own criteria of judgment. Progress 
in morals consists in raising the general level of intelligence 
and extending the group whose approvals are significant from 
a social class to the nation, a notion of highest appeal to 
Democracy, with its faith in the individual man. But with 
Dewey the limit of group expansion is humanity, and this may 
verge on dangerous (unfortunately) radicalism. Dewey's 
weapon against conventional ethics is two-edged. For the 
intelligent man perhaps there is no better actual moral stand- 
ard than that springing from intelligent specific judgments, 
but for the uneducated, it is only too easy to identify intel- 
ligence with sentimental opinion and to let practice degenerate 
into legislative repression. 

After all, judgments of practice do face incomplete situa- 
tions and the problem is not only to complete but also to deter- 
mine the manner in which the completion shall be brought 
about. What men transform is not merely the world, but 
themselves, and the ethics is incomplete without some further 
consideration of such questions as what are human natures, 
and what do we want them to become. But perhaps such 



PHILOSOPHY 175 

questions are too dangerously near metaphysics to have ap- 
pealed to Dewey's powers of analysis. At any rate, the gen- 
eral effectiveness of his ethics is weakened by his neglect of 
attention to principles in some sense at least ultimate. 

In education Dewey's philosophy has its most complete 
vitality, for here he is dealing with concrete needs and the 
means of satisfying them. The problem of education is to 
integrate knowledge and life. He finds no joy in information 
for information's sake. Curiosity may be the gift of the 
child, but it must be utilized to equip the man to hold his own 
in a world of industrialism and democracy. Yet Dewey's sym- 
pathies are with spontaneity. He is a Rousseau with a new 
methodology. Connected with the Laboratory School at Chi- 
cago from 1896 to 1903, he has since followed with sympa- 
thetic interest all radical experimentation from the methods of 
Madame Montessori to those of the Gary Schools. The vast 
erudition amassed in this field, and his careful and unprejudiced 
study of children, has made him competent above all men to 
speak critically of methods and results. 

In regard to education, he has given a fuller consideration 
of the ends to be attained than in the case of ethics. The end 
is seen as continued growth, springing from the existing con- 
ditions, freeing activity, and flexible in its adaptation to cir- 
cumstances. The educational result is social efficiency and 
culture. This efficiency does not, however, imply accepting 
existing economic conditions as final, and its cultural aspect, 
good citizenship, includes with the more specific positive vir- 
tues, those characteristics that make a man a good companion. 
Culture is a complete ripening of the personality. " What 
is termed spiritual culture has usually been futile, with some- 
thing rotten about it, just because it has been conceived as a 
thing which a man might have internally — and therefore ex- 
clusively." The antithesis between sacrificing oneself for 
others, or others for oneself, is an unreal figment of the imagi- 
nation, a tragic product of certain spiritual and religious 
thinking. 

Professor Dewey well understands the dangers that lurk 
behind such terms as social efficiency and good citizenship. 
To him sympathy is much more than a mere feeling: it is, as 



176 CIVILIZATION 

he says it should be, "a cultivated imagination for what men 
have in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily 
divides them." But his very gift of clear vision, his penetration 
of the shams of dogma, economic and social, leads him to treat 
these things with scant respect. In consequence his fellow- 
philosophers, the educators over whom his influence is pro- 
found, and the public suspect him of radicalism. Only too 
often, to avoid suspicion of themselves, they turn his doctrine 
to the very uses that he condemns: industrial efficiency for 
them becomes identical with business expedience; the school, a 
trade school; culture, a detached sestheticism to be condemned; 
and democracy, the privilege of thinking and acting like every- 
body else. 

The greatest weakness of Dewey's philosophy, and it is 
serious, for Dewey as no other American philosopher grasps 
principles through which American civilization might be trans- 
formed for the better — lies in its lack of a metaphysics. Not, 
of course, a transcendentalism or a religious mysticism, but 
above all an interpretation of human nature. Emotionality 
represents a phase of the behaviour process too real to deny, 
yet it has no place in Dewey's philosophy of man. Human 
longings and aspirations are facts as real as the materials of 
industry. Most men remain religious. Must they rest with 
quack mystics or unintelligent dogmatists? What is religion 
giving them that they crave? Is it a form of art, an attitude 
toward the ideal, or some interpretation of the forces of na- 
ture that they seek to grasp? Professor Dewey is himself a 
lover of art, but what place has art in his philosophy? If 
it is an instrument of education, what end does it serve, and 
how is it to be utilized? The pragmatic ethics gives no guar- 
antee that the moral criteria developed by specific situations 
will always be the same even for two men equally intelligent. 
Perhaps, in spite of the paradox, there may be several best 
solutions. If so, this fact has some significance rooted in 
man's nature and his relations to the world that philosophy 
should disclose. Such supplementation need not change the 
character of the results, but it might forefend them from mis- 
interpretation and abuse. 

With all its incompleteness, Dewey's philosophy is undenia- 



PHILOSOPHY 177 

bly that of the America of to-day. What shall we say of the 
future? No nation in the world has more abused its philoso- 
phies than ours. The inspirational elements of our idealisms 
have become the panderings of sentimentalists. The vitalizing 
forces of our pragmatisms threaten to congeal into the dogmata 
of cash-success. The war has intensified our national self- 
satisfaction. We tend to condemn all vision as radical, hence 
unsound, hence evil, hence to be put down. Philosophy thrives 
in the atmosphere of the Bacchse: 

" What else is Wisdom? What of man's endeavour 
Or God's high grace, so lovely and so great? 
To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait; 
To hold a hand uplifted over Hate; 
And shall not loveliness be loved for ever? " 

But what have we now of this atmosphere? 

At Christmas-time, the American Philosophical Association 
devoted three sessions to the discussion of the Role of the 
Philosopher in Modern Life. From report, opinion was di- 
vided between those who would have him a social reformer, 
to the exclusion of contemplative background, and those with 
a greater sense of playing safe, who would have him turn to 
history, of any sort, or contemplation quite detached from 
social consequences. Let us hope these opinions are not to 
be taken seriously. Our social reformers are not all like 
Dewey, whose neglect of basic reflection is probably not as 
great as the omission of such reflections from his published 
works would indicate. Nor is an academic chair generally 
suited to the specific contacts with life from which successful 
reforms must be shaped. On the other hand, abstract contem- 
plation with the pedagogic reinforcements advocated, will con- 
firm the popular American sentiment against reflection, if it is 
true, as Dewey asserts, that education must be an outgrowth 
of existing conditions. Fortunately genius, if such there be 
amongst us, will not submit to the opinions of the American 
Philosophic Association. If philosophy can find freedom, per- 
haps America can yet find philosophy. 

Harold Chapman Brown 



THE LITERARY LIFE 

AMONG all the figures which, in Mrs. Wharton's " The Age 
of Innocence," make up the pallid little social foreground, 
the still more pallid middle distance, of the New York of forty 
years ago, there is none more pallid than the figure of Ned 
Winsett, the " man of letters untimely bom in a world that 
had no need of letters." Winsett, we are told, " had published 
one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations," of 
which one hundred and twenty copies had been sold, and had 
then abandoned his calling and taken an obscure post on a 
women's weekly. " On the subject of Hearth-fires (as the 
paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining," says Mrs. 
Wharton; " but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of 
the still young man who has tried and given up." Sterile bit- 
terness, a bright futility, a beginning without a future: that 
is the story of Ned Winsett. 

One feels, as one turns Mrs. Wharton's pages, how sym- 
bolic this is of the literary life in America. I shall say noth- 
ing of the other arts, though the vital conditions of all the arts 
have surely much in common; I shall say nothing of America 
before the Civil War, for the America that New England domi- 
nated was a different nation from ours. But what immediately 
strikes one, as one surveys the history of our literature during 
the last half century, is the singular impotence of its creative 
spirit. That we have and have always had an abundance of 
talent is, I think, no less evident: what I mean is that so little 
of this talent succeeds in effectuating itself. Of how many 
of our modern writers can it be said that their work reveals 
a continuous growth, or indeed any growth, that they hold their 
ground tenaciously and preserve their sap from one decade to 
another? Where, to speak relatively, the characteristic evolu- 
tion of the European writer is one of an ever-increasing dif- 
ferentiation, a progress toward the creation, the possession of a 
world absolutely his own (the world of Shaw, the world of 

179 



i8o CIVILIZATION 

Hardy, the world of Hamsun, of Gorky, of Anatole France), 
the American writer, having struck out with his new note, 
becomes — how often! — progressively less and less himself. 
The blighted career, the arrested career, the diverted career 
are, with us, the rule. The chronic state of our literature is 
that of a youthful promise which is never redeemed. 

The great writer, the grand ecrivain, has at the best of times 
appeared but once or twice in America: that is another mat- 
ter. I am speaking, as I say, of the last half century, and I 
am speaking of the rank and file. There are those who will 
deny this characterization of our literature, pointing to what 
they consider the robust and wholesome corpus of our " nor- 
mal " fiction. But this fiction, in its way, precisely corrobo- 
rates my point. What is the quality of the spirit behind it? 
How much does it contain of that creative element the char- 
acter of which consists in dominating life instead of being 
dominated by it? Have these novelists of ours any world of 
their own as distinguished from the world they observe and 
reflect, the world they share with their neighbours? Is it a 
personal vision that informs them, or a mob-vision? The 
Danish writer, Johannes V. Jensen, has described their work 
as "journalism under exceptionally fortunate conditions." 
Journalism, on the whole, it assuredly is^ and the chief of these 
fortunate conditions (fortunate for journalism!) has been the 
general failure of the writers in question to establish and de- 
velop themselves as individuals; as they have rendered unto 
Caesar what was intended for God, is it any wonder that Caesar 
has waxed so fat? " The unfortunate thing," writes Mr. Mon- 
trose J. Moses, " is that the American drama " — but the obser- 
vation is equally true of this fiction of ours — " has had many 
brilliant promises which have finally thinned out and never 
materialized." And again: "The American dramatist has 
always taken his logic second-hand; he has always allowed his 
theatrical sense to be a slave to managerial circumstance." The 
two statements are complementary, and they apply, as I say, to 
the whole of this " normal " literature of ours. Managerial 
circumstance? Let us call it local patriotism, the spirit of the 
times, the hunger of the public for this, that, or the other: 
to some one of these demands, these promptings from without, 



THE LITERARY LIFE i8i 

the " normal " American writer always allows himself to be- 
come a slave. It is the fact, indeed, of his being a slave to 
some demand from without that makes him " normal " — and 
something else than an artist. 

The flourishing exterior of the main body of our contempo- 
rary literature, in short, represents anything but the integrity 
of an inner well-being. But even aside from this, one can 
count on one's two hands the American writers who are able 
to carry on the development and unfolding of their individu- 
alities, year in, year out, as every competent man of affairs 
carries on his business. What fate overtakes the rest? Shall 
I begin to run over some of those names, familiar to us all, 
names that have signified so much promise and are lost in what 
Gautier calls " the limbo where moan (in the company of 
babes) still-born vocations, abortive attempts, larvae of ideas 
that have won neither wings nor shapes "? Shall I mention 
the writers — but they are countless! — who have lapsed into 
silence, or have involved themselves in barren eccentricities, 
or have been turned into machines? The poets who, at the 
very outset of their careers, find themselves extinguished like 
so many candles? The novelists who have been unable to 
grow up, and remain withered boys of seventeen? The critics 
who find themselves overtaken in mid-career by a hardening 
of the spiritual arteries? Our writers all but universally lack 
the power of growth, the endurance that enables one to con- 
tinue to produce personal work after the freshness of youth 
has gone. Weeds and wild flowers! Weeds without beautv 
or fragrance, and wild flowers that cannot survive the heat o 
the day. 

Such is the aspect of our contemporary literature; beside 
that of almost any European country, it is indeed one long list 
of spiritual casualties. For it is not that the talent is wanting, 
but that somehow this talent fails to fulfil itself. 

This being so, how much one would like to assume, with 
certain of our critics, that the American writer is a sort of 
Samson bound with the brass fetters of the Philistines and 
requiring only to have those fetters cast off in order to be able 
to conquer the world! That, as I understand it, is the position 
of Mr. Dreiser, who recently remarked of certain of our novel- 



1 82 CIVILIZATION 

ists: " They succeeded in writing but one book before the 
iron hand of convention took hold of them." There is this 
to be said for the argument, that if the American writer as a 
type shows less resistance than the European writer it is plainly 
because he has been insufficiently equipped, stimulated, nour- 
ished by the society into which he has been born. In this sense 
the American environment is answerable for the literature it 
has produced. But what is significant is that the American 
writer does show less resistance; as literature is nothing but the 
expression of power, of the creative will, of " free will," in 
short, is it not more accurate to say, not that the " iron hand 
of convention " takes hold of our writers, but that our writers 
yield to the " iron hand of convention "? Samson had lost his 
virility before the Philistines bound him; it was because he 
had lost his virility that the Philistines were able to bind him. 
The American writer who " goes wrong " is in a similar case. 
" I have read," says Mr. Dreiser^ of Jack London, " several 
short stories which proved what he could do. But he did not 
feel that he cared for want and public indifference. Hence his 
many excellent romances." He did not feel that he cared for 
want and public indifference. Even Mr. Dreiser, as we ob- 
serve, determinist that he is, admits a margin of free will, 
for he represents Jack London as having made a choice. What 
concerns us now, however, is not a theoretical but a practical 
question, the fact, namely, that the American writer as a rule 
is actuated not by faith but by fear, that he cannot meet the 
obstacles of " want and public indifference " as the European 
writer meets them, that he is, indeed, and as if by nature, a 
journeyman and a hireling. 

As we see, then, the creative will in this country is a very 
weak and sickly plant. Of the innumerable talents that are 
always emerging about us there are few that come to any sort 
of fruition: the rest wither early; they are transformed into 
those neuroses that flourish on our soil as orchids flourish in 
the green jungle. The sense of this failure is written all over 
our literature. Do we not know what depths of disappoint- 
ment underlay the cynicism of Mark Twain and Henry Adams 
and Ambrose Bierce? Have we failed to recognize, in the 
surly contempt with which the author of " The Story of a 



THE LITERARY LIFE 183 

Country Town " habitually speaks of writers and writing, the 
unconscious cry of sour grapes of a man whose creative life 
was arrested in youth? Are we unaware of the bitterness with 
which, in certain letters of his later years, Jack London 
regretted the miscarriage of his gift? There is no denying 
that for half a century the American writer as a type has gone 
down in defeat. 

Now why is this so? Why does the American writer, rela- 
tively speaking, show less resistance than the European writer? 
Plainly, as I have just said, because he has been insufficiently 
equipped, stimulated, nourished by the society into which he 
has been h^xfy^H our creative spirits are unable to grow 
and mature,W^is a sign that there is something wanting in the 
soil from which they spring and in the conditions that surround 
them. Is it not, for that matter, a sign of some more general 
failure in our life? 

" At the present moment," wrote Mr. Chesterton in one of 
his early essays ("The Fallacy of the Young Nation"), 
struck by the curious anaemia of those few artists of ours who 
have succeeded in developing themselves, usually by escaping 
from the American environment; " at the present moment the 
matter which America has very seriously to consider is not 
how near it is to its birth and beginning, but how near it 
may be to its end. . . . The English colonies have produced 
no great artists, and that fact may prove that they are still 
full of silent possibilities and reserve force. But America 
has produced great artists and that fact most certainly means 
that she is full of a fine futility and the end of all things. 
Whatever the American men of genius are, they are not young 
gods making a young world. Is the art of Whistler a brave, 
barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James 
infect us with the spirit of a school-boy? No, the colonies 
have not spoken, and they are safe. Their silence may be 
the silence of the unborn. But out of America has come a 
sweet and startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a d3Hing 
man." That there is truth behind this, that the soil of our 
society is at least arid and impoverished, is indicated by the 
testimony of our own poets; one has only to consider what 
George Cabot Lodge wrote in 1904, in one of his letters: " We 



i84 CIVILIZATION 

are a d3ang race, as every race must be of which the men are, 
as men and not accumulators, third-rate "; one has only to 
consider the writings of Messrs. Frost, Robinson, and Masters, 
in whose presentation of our life, in the West as well as in 
the East, the individual as a spiritual unit invariably suffers 
defeat. Fifty years ago J. A. Froude, on a visit to this coun- 
try, wrote to one of his friends: "From what I see of the 
Eastern states I do not anticipate any very great things as 
likely to come out of the Americans. . . . They are generous 
with their money, have much tenderness and quiet good hu- 
mour; but the Anglo-Saxon power is running to seed and I 
don't think will revive." When we consider the general col- 
ourlessness and insipidity of our latter-day life (faithfully 
reflected in the novels of Howells and his successors), the 
absence from it of profound passions and intense convictions, 
of any representative individuals who can be compared in spir- 
itual force with Emerson, Thoreau, and so many of their con- 
temporaries, its uniformity and its uniform tepidity, then the 
familiar saying, " Our age has been an age of management, 
not of ideas or of men," assumes indeed a very sinister import. 
I go back to the poet Lodge's letters. " Was there ever," he 
writes, " such an anomaly as the American man? In practical 
affairs his cynicism, energy, and capacity are simply stupefy- 
ing, and in every other respect he is a sentimental idiot pos- 
sessing neither the interest, the capacity, nor the desire for 
even the most elementary processes of independent thought. 
. . . His wife finds him so sexually inapt that she refuses to 
bear him children and so drivelling in every way except as a 
money-getter that she compels him to expend his energies solely 
in that direction while she leads a discontented, sterile, stunted 
life. . . ." Is this to be denied? And does it not in part 
explain that extraordinary lovelessness of the American scene 
which has bred the note of a universal resentment in so much 
of our contemporary fiction? As well expect figs from thistles 
as any considerable number of men from such a soil who are 
robust enough to prefer spiritual to material victories and who 
are capable of achieving them. 

It is unnecessary to go back to Taine in order to realize 
that here we have a matrix as unpropitious as possible for 



THE LITERARY LIFE 185 

literature and art. If our writers wither early, if they are too 
generally pliant, passive, acquiescent, anaemic, how much is 
this not due to the heritage of pioneering, with its burden 
of isolation, nervous strain, excessive work and all the racial 
habits that these have engendered? 

Certainly, for example, if there is anything that counts in 
the formation of the creative spirit it is that long infancy to 
which John Fiske, rightly or wrongly, attributed the emergence 
of man from the lower species. In the childhood of almost 
every great writer one finds this protracted incubation, this 
slow stretch of years in which the unresisting organism opens 
itself to the influences of life. It was so with Hawthorne, it 
was so with Whitman in the pastoral America of a century 
ago: they were able to mature, these brooding spirits, be- 
cause they had given themselves for so long to life before they 
began to react upon it. That is the old-world childhood still, 
in a measure; how different it is from the modern American 
childhood may be seen if one compares, for example, the first 
book ("Boyhood") of " Pelle the Conqueror" with any of 
those innumerable tales in which our novelists show us that 
in order to succeed in life one cannot be up and doing too 
soon. The whole temper of our society, if one is to judge 
from these documents, is to hustle the American out of his 
childhood, teaching him at no age at all how to repel life and 
get the best of it and build up the defences behind which he is 
going to fight for his place in the sun. Who can deny that 
this racial habit succeeds in its unconscious aim, which is to 
produce sharp-witted men of business? But could anything 
be deadlier to the poet, the artist, the writer? 

Everything in such an environment, it goes without saying, 
tends to repress the creative and to stimulate the competitive 
impulses. A certain Irish poet has observed that all he ever 
learned of poetry he got from talking with peasants along the 
road. Whitman might have said almost as much, even of 
New York, the New York of seventy years ago. But what 
nourishment do they offer the receptive spirit to-day, the 
harassed, inhibited mob of our fellow-countrjmien, eaten up 
with the " itch of ill-advised activity," what encouragement to 
become anything but an automaton like themselves? And 



1 86 CIVILIZATION ^ 

what direction, in such a society, does the instinct of emula- 
tion receive, that powerful instinct of adolescence? A certain 
visitor of Whitman's has described him as living in a house 
" as cheerless as an ash-barrel," a house indeed " like that in 
which a very destitute mechanic " might have lived. Is it not 
symbolic, that picture, of the esteem in which our democracy 
holds the poet? If to-day the man of many dollars is no 
longer the hero of the editorial page and the baccalaureate 
address, still, or rather more than ever, it is the " aggressive " 
type that overshadows every corner of our civilization; the 
intellectual man who has gone his own way and refused to 
flatter the majority was never less the hero or even the subject 
of intelligent interest; at best ignored, at worst (and usually) 
pointed out as a crank, 'he is only a " warning " to youth, 
which is exceedingly susceptible in these matters. But how 
can one begin to enumerate the elements in our society that 
contribute to form a selection constantly working against the 
survival of the creative type? By cutting off the sources that 
nourish it, by lending prestige to the acquisitive and destroying 
the glamour of the creative career, everything in America 
conspires to divert the spirit from its natural course, seizing 
upon the instincts of youth and turning them into a single 
narrow channel. 

Here, of course, I touch upon the main fact of American 
history. That traditional drag, if one may so express it, in 
the direction of the practical, which has been the law of our 
civilization, would alone explain why our literature and art 
have never been more than half-hearted. To abandon the 
unpopular and unremunerative career of painting for the useful 
and lucrative career of invention must have seemed natural 
and inevitable to Robert Fulton and Samuel Morse. So strong 
is this racial compulsion, so feeble is the hold which Americans 
have upon ultimate values, that one can scarcely find to-day a 
scientist or a scholar who, for the sake of science or scholarship, 
will refuse an opportunity to become the money-gathering pres- 
ident of some insignificant university. Thus our intellectual 
life has always been ancillary to the life of business and or- 
ganization : have we forgotten that the good Washington Irving 
himself, the father of American letters, thought it by no means 



THE LITERARY LIFE 187 

beneath his dignity to serve as a sort of glorified press-agent 
for John Jacob Astor? 

It is certainly true that none of these unfavourable factors 
of American life could have had such a baleful effect upon our 
literature if there had been others to counteract them. An 
aristocratic tradition, if we had ever had it, would have kept 
open among us the right of way of the free individual, would 
have preserved the claims of mere living. " It is curious to ob- 
serve," writes Nietzsche in one of his letters, " how any one 
who soon leaves the traditional highway in order to travel on 
his own proper path always has more or less the sense of be- 
ing an exile, a condemned criminal, a fugitive from mankind." 
If that is true in the old world, where society is so much more 
complex and offers the individual so much more latitude, how 
few could ever have had the strength in a society like ours, 
which has always placed such an enormous premium on con- 
formity, to become and to remain themselves? Is it fanciful 
indeed to see in the famous " remorse " of Poe the traces left 
by this dereliction of the tribal law upon the unconscious mind 
of an artist of unique force and courage? Similarly, a tradi- 
tion of voluntary poverty would have provided us with an es- 
cape from the importunities of bourgeois custom. But aside 
from the fact that even so simple a principle as this depends 
largely for its life on precedent (Whitman and the painter 
Ryder are almost alone among latter-day Americans in having 
discovered it for themselves), aside from the fact that to secede 
from the bourgeois system is, in America, to subject oneself to 
peculiar penalties (did it ever occur to Mark Twain that he 
could be honourably poor?) — aside from all this, poverty in 
the new world is by no means the same thing as poverty in the 
old: one has only to think of Charles Lamb and all the riches 
that London freely gave him, all the public resources he had 
at his disposal, to appreciate the difference. With us poverty 
means in the end an almost inevitable intellectual starvation. 
Consider such a plaint as Sidney Lanier's: " I could never de- 
scribe to you " (he writes to Bayard Taylor) " what a mere 
drought and famine my life has been, as regards that multi- 
tude of matters which I fancy one absorbs when one is in an 
atmosphere of art, or when one is in conversational relation- 



1 88 CIVILIZATION 

ship with men of letters, with travellers, with persons who have 
either seen, or written, or done large things. Perhaps you 
know that, with us of the younger generation in the South 
since the war, pretty much the whole of life has been merely 
not dying." That is what poverty means in America, poverty 
and isolation, for Lanier, whose talent, as we can see to-day, 
was hopelessly crippled by it, was mistaken if he supposed 
that there was anything peculiar to the South in that plight of 
his: it has been the plight of the sensitive man everywhere in 
America and at all times. Add to poverty the want of a so- 
ciety devoted to intellectual things and we have such a fate as 
Herman Melville's in New York. " What he lacked," wrote 
Mr. Frank Jewett Mather the other day, explaining the singu- 
lar evaporation of Melville's talent, " was possibly only health 
and nerve, but perhaps even more, companionship of a friendly, 
critical, understanding sort. In London, where he must have 
been hounded out of his corner, I can imagine Melville carry- 
ing the reflective vein to literary completion." Truly Samuel 
Butler was right when he jotted down the following observa- 
tion in his note-book: "America will have her geniuses, as 
every other country has, in fact she has already had one in 
Walt Whitman, but I do not think America is a good place in 
which to be a genius. A genius can never expect to have a 
good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is 
about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for 
an inspired writer of any kind." 

To such circumstances as these, I say, the weakness of our 
literary life is due. If we had lacked nothing else indeed, the 
lack of great leaders, of a strong and self-respecting literary 
guild, even of an enlightened publishing system would have 
sufficed to account for much of it. To consider the last point 
first: in the philosophy of American publishing, popularity has 
been regarded not only as a practical advantage but as a vir- 
tue as well. Thanks to the peculiar character of our democ- 
racy, our publishers have been able to persuade themselves 
that a book which fails to appeal to the ordinary citizen can- 
not be good on other grounds. Thus, if we had had to depend 
on the established system, the present revival in our letters, 
tentative as it is, would have been still more sadly handi- 



THE LITERARY LIFE 189 

capped. The history of Mr. Dreiser's " Sister Carrie " is 
enough to suggest what may well have been the fate of many 
an incipient author less persistent than he. It is certain, in 
any case, that many another, at a critical moment, has drifted 
away from literature because of the lack in our publishing 
world of those opportunities for a semi-creative hack-work 
which have provided countless European writers with a foot- 
hold and even a guideway. The Grub Street of London and 
Paris is a purgatory, but as long as it exists, with its humble 
instrumentalities, translating, editing, reviewing, one can at 
least survive until one has either lost or found oneself: it 
scarcely needs to be pointed out that the American magazine, 
with its mechanical exactions, which levy such a terrible toll 
upon one's individuality, is anything but an advantageous sub- 
stitute. Till one has found oneself, the less one is subjected to 
such powerful, such essentially depolarizing influences, the bet- 
ter; the most mediocre institutions, if they enable one at the 
same time to maintain one's contact with literature and to keep 
body and soul together, are as life is to death beside them. How 
many English writers owe their ultimate salvation to such 
trivial agencies as T. P.'s Weekly? In America, where 
nothing of the kind has existed until lately, or nothing ade- 
quate to the number of those who might have benefitted by it, 
the literary aspirant is lost unless his powers mature at once. 
But the lack of great leaders, of a strong and self-respecting 
literary guild (the one results from the other) — is not this 
our chief misfortune? In the best of circumstances, and con- 
sidering all the devils that beset the creative spirit, a strong 
impulse is scarcely enough to carry one through: one must 
feel not only that one is doing what one wishes to do but that 
what one is doing matters. If dozens of American writers 
have fallen by the wayside because they have met with in- 
superable obstacles, dozens of others have fallen, with all their 
gifts, because they have lost interest in their work, because 
they have ceased to " see the necessity " of it. This is just 
the point where the presence of a leader, of a local tradition, 
a school, a guild makes all the difference. " With the masters 
I converse," writes Gauguin in his journal. "Their example 
fortifies me. When I am tempted to falter I blush before 



190 CIVILIZATION 

them." If that could have been true of Gauguin, the " Wolf," 
who walked by himself as few have walked, what shall we say 
of other men whose artistic integrity, whose faith in them- 
selves, is exposed every day to the corroding influences of a 
third-rate civilization? It would be all very well if literature 
were merely a mode of " having a good time;" I am speaking 
of those, the real artists, who, with Nietzsche, make a distinc- 
tion (illusory perhaps) between '' happiness " and " work," 
and I say that these men have always fed on the thought of 
greatness and on the propinquity of greatness. It was not 
for nothing that Turgeniev bore in his memory, as a talisman, 
the image of Pushkin; that Gorky, having seen Tolstoy once, 
sitting among the boulders on the seashore, felt everything 
in him blending in one happy thought, " I am not an 
orphan on the earth, so long as this man lives on it." The 
presence of such men immeasurably raises the morale of the 
literary life: that is what Chekhov meant when he said, " I 
am afraid of Tolstoy's death," and is it not true that the whole 
contemporary literature of England has drawn virtue from 
Thomas Hardy? The sense that one is working in a great line: 
this, more than anything else perhaps, renews one's confidence 
in the " quaint mania of passing one's life wearing oneself out 
over words," as Flaubert called it, in the still greater folly of 
pursuing one's ego when everything in life combines to punish 
one for doing so. The successful pursuit of the ego is what 
makes literature; this requires not only a certain inner inten- 
sity but a certain courage, and it is doubtful whether, in any 
nation, any considerable number of men can summon up that 
courage and maintain it unless they have seen the thing done. 
The very notion that such a life is either possible or desirable, 
the notion that such a life exists even, can hardly occur to the 
rank and file: some individual has to start the ball rolling, 
some individual of extraordinary force and audacity, and where 
is that individual to be found in our modern American litera- 
ture? Whitman is the unique instance, for Henry James, with 
all his admirable conscience, was at once an exile and a man 
of singularly low vitality; and Whitman was not only essen- 
tially of an earlier generation, he was an invalid who folded 
his hands in mid-career. 



THE LITERARY LIFE 191 

Of those others what can we say, those others whose gifts 
have fitted them to be our leaders? Mr. Howells once ob- 
served of the American drama of the last few decades that 
" mainly it has been gay as our prevalent mood is, mainly it 
has been honest, as our habit is, in cases where we believe we 
can afford it." In this gently ironical pleasantry one seems to 
discern the true spirit of modern American letters. But it was 
Howells himself who, in order to arrive at the doctrine that 
" the more smiling aspects of life are the more American," de- 
liberately, as he has told us, and professed realist that he was, 
averted his eyes from the darker side of life. And Mark Twain 
suppressed his real beliefs about man and the universe. And 
Henry Adams refused to sponsor in public the novels that re- 
vealed what he considered to be the truth about American so- 
ciety. Thus spake Zarathustra: " There is no harsher mis- 
fortune in all the fate of man than when the mighty ones of 
earth are not also the most excellent." At its very headwaters, 
as we see, this modern literature of ours has failed to flow 
clear: the creative impulse in these men, richly endowed as 
they were, was checked and compromised by too many other 
impulses, social and commercial. If one is to blame anything 
for this it is the immense insecurity of our life, which is due 
to its chaotic nature; for one is not entitled to expect great- 
ness even of those who have the greatest gifts, and of these 
men Henry Adams was alone secure; of Howells and Mark 
Twain, Westerners as they were, it may be said that they were 
obliged to compromise, consciously or unconsciously, in order 
to gain a foothold in the only corner of the country where men 
could exist as writers at all. But if these men were unable 
to establish their independence (one has only to recall the no- 
torious Gorky dinner in order to perceive the full ignominy of 
their position), what must one expect to find in the rank and 
file? Great men form a sort of wind shield behind which the 
rest of their profession are able to build up their own defences; 
they establish a right of way for the others; they command a 
respect for their profession, they arouse in the public a concern 
for it, an interest in it, from which the others benefit. As 
things are, the literary guild in America is not respected, nor 
does it respect itself. In " My Literary Passions " Howells, 



192 CIVILIZATION 

after saying that his early reading gave him no standing among 
other boys, observes: " I have since found that Hterature gives 
one no more certain station in the world of men's activities, 
either idle or useful. We literary folk try to believe that it 
does, but that is all nonsense. At every period of life among 
boys or men we are accepted when they are at leisure and 
want to be amused, and at best we are tolerated rather than 
accepted." Pathetic? Pusillanimous? Abject? Pathetic, I 
suppose. Imagine Maxim Gorky or Knut Hamsun or Bernard 
Shaw " trying to believe " that literature gives him a certain 
station in the world of men's activities, conceiving for a mo- 
ment that any activity could exceed his in dignity! Howells, 
we observe, conscientious craftsman as he was, instinctively 
shared, in regard to the significance of his vocation, the feel- 
ing of our pragmatic philosophers, who have been obliged to 
justify the intellectual life by showing how useful it is — not to 
mention Mr. R. W. Chambers, who has remarked that writers 
" are not held in excessive esteem by really busy people, the 
general idea being — which is usually true — that literature is a 
godsend to those unfitted for real work." After this one can 
easily understand why our novelists take such pains to be mis- 
taken for business men and succeed so admirably in their ef- 
fort. One can easily understand why Jack London preferred 
the glory of his model ranch and his hygienic pigsties to the 
approval of his artistic conscience. 

So much for the conditions, or at least a few of them, that 
have prevented our literature from getting its head above 
water. If America is littered with extinct talents^ the halt, the 
maimed and the blind, it is for reasons with which we are all 
too familiar; and we to whom the creative life is nothing less 
than the principle of human movement, and its welfare the true 
sign of human health, look upon this wreckage of everything 
that is most precious to society and ask ourselves what our 
fathers meant when they extolled the progress of our civiliza- 
tion. But let us look facts in the face. Mr. Sinclair Lewis 
asserts that we are in the midst of a revival and that we are 
too humble in supposing that our contemporary literature is 
inferior to that of England. That we are in the midst of a 
revival I have no doubt, but it is the sustained career that 



THE LITERARY LIFE 193 

makes a literature; without the evidence of this we can hope 
much but we can affirm nothing. What we can see is that, 
with all its hope, the morale of the literary profession in this 
country is just what its antecedents have made it. I am re- 
minded of the observation of a friend who has reason to know, 
that the Catholic Church in America, great as it is in numbers 
and organization, still depends on the old world for its models, 
its task-masters and its inspiration; for the American priest, 
as a rule, does not feel the vocation as the European feels it. 
I am reminded of the American labour movement which, pros- 
perous as it is in comparison with the labour movements of 
Europe, is unparalleled for the feebleness of its representatives. 
I am reminded of certain brief experiences in the American 
university world which have led me to believe that the profes- 
sors who radiate a genuine light and warmth are far more 
likely to be Russians, Germans, Englishmen, Irishmen, Dutch- 
men, Swedes and Finns than the children of '76. That old 
hostility of the pioneers to the special career still operates to 
prevent in the American mind the powerful, concentrated pur- 
suit of any non-utilitarian way of life: meanwhile everything 
else in our society tends to check the growth of the spirit and 
to shatter the confidence of the individual in himself. Consid- 
ered with reference to its higher manifestations, life itself has 
been thus far, in modern America, a failure. Of this the 
failure of our literature is merely emblematic. 

Mr. Mencken, who shares this belief, urges that the only 
hope of a change for the better lies in the development of a 
native aristocracy that will stand between the writer and the 
public, supporting him, appreciating him, forming as it were 
a cordon sanitaire between the individual and the mob. That 
no change can come without the development of an aristocracy 
of some sort, some nucleus of the more gifted, energetic and 
determined, one can hardly doubt. But how can one expect 
the emergence of an aristocracy outside of the creative class, 
and devoted to its welfare, unless and until the creative class 
itself reveals the sort of pride that can alone attract its minis- 
trations? "The notion that a people can run itself and its 
affairs anonymously is now well known to be the silliest of ab- 
surdities." Thus William James, in defence of the aristocratic 



194 CIVILIZATION 

principle; and what he says is as applicable to literature as to 
every other department of social life. But he continues: 
" Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part 
of inventors, great and small, and imitation by the rest of us — 
these are the sole factors alive in human progress. Individuals 
of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common 
people then adopt and follow." In other words, as I under- 
stand it, and so far as literature is concerned, the burden of 
proof lies on the writer himself — which brings one back to a 
truism: it is not for the public or any aristocratic minority 
within the public to understand the writer, it is for the writer 
to create the taste by which he is understood. Is it not by 
this indeed (in a measure, at least) that we recognize the 
creator? 

Certainly if our contemporary literature is not respected, if 
it has not been able to rally to its support the sensitive public 
that already exists in this country, it is partly because this 
literature has not respected itself. That there has been every 
reason for it makes no difference; that it has begun to respect 
itself again makes no difference either, for when a people has 
lost confidence in its literature, and has had grounds for losing 
confidence in it, one cannot be surprised if it insists a little cyn- 
ically upon being " shown." The public supported Mark 
Twain and Howells and the men of their generation, it ad- 
mired them for what was admirable in them, but it was aware, 
if only unconsciously, that there was a difference between them 
and the men of the generation before them; and in consequence 
of this the whole stock of American literature fell. But those 
who insist in our day that America prefers European writers 
to its own, because America is still a colony of Europe, cannot 
ignore the significant fact that at a time when America was 
still more truly colonial than it is now American writers had 
all the prestige in this country that European writers have at 
present; and it is not entirely because at that time the country 
was more homogeneous. Poe and Thoreau found little sup- 
port in the generation of which I speak, as Whitman found 
little support in the generation that followed it. On the other 
hand, there v/ere no European writers (and it was an age of 
great writers in Europe) who were held in higher esteem in 



THE LITERARY LIFE 195 

this country than Hawthorne, Emerson, Motley, and one or 
two others almost equally distinguished, as well from a Euro- 
pean as from an American point of view; there were few, if 
any, European writers, in fact, who were esteemed in this 
country as highly as they. How can one explain it? How can 
one explain why, at a time when America, in every other de- 
partment of life, was more distinctly colonial than it is now, 
American literature commanded the full respect of Americans, 
while to-day, when the colonial tradition is vanishing all about 
us, it so little commands their respect that they go after any 
strange god from England? The problem is not a simple one, 
but among the many explanations of it one can hardly deny 
that there were in that period a number of writers of unusual 
power, who made the most (who were able to make the most) 
of their power, who followed their artistic conscience (who 
were able to follow it) and who by this fact built up a public 
confidence in themselves and in the literature they represented. 
Does it matter at all whether to-day we enjoy these writers or 
not? They were men of spiritual force, three or four of them: 
that is the important point. If the emerging writers of our 
epoch find themselves handicapped by the scepticism of the 
public, which has ceased to believe that any good thing can 
come out of Nazareth, let them remember not only that they 
are themselves for the most part in the formative stage, but 
that they have to live down the recent past of their profession. 
Meanwhile, what constitutes a literature is the spiritual force 
of the individuals who compose it. If our literature is ever to 
be regenerated, therefore, it can only be through the develop- 
ment of a sense of " free will " (and of the responsibility that 
this entails) on the part of our writers themselves. To be, to 
feel oneself, a " victim " is in itself not to be an artist, for it 
is the nature of the artist to live, not in the world of which he 
is an effect, but in the world of which he is the cause, the world 
of his own creation. For this reason, the pessimistic deter- 
minism of the present age is, from the point of view of litera- 
ture, of a piece with the optimistic determinism of the age that 
is passing. What this pessimistic determinism reveals, how- 
ever, is a consciousness of the situation: to that extent it rep- 
resents a gain, and one may even say that to be conscious of 



196 CIVILIZATION 

the situation is half the battle. If we owed nothing else to Mr. 
Dreiser, for instance, we should owe him enough for the tragic 
sense of the waste and futility of American life, as we know 
it, which his books communicate. It remains true that in so 
far as we resent this life it is a sign of our own weakness, of 
the harm not only that our civilization has done us but that 
we have permitted it to do us, of our own imperfectly realized 
freedom; for to the creative spirit in its free state the external 
world is merely an impersonal point of departure. Thus it is 
certain that as long as the American writer shares what James 
Bryce calls the " mass fatalism " of the American people, our 
literature will remain the sterile, supine, and inferior phenom- 
enon which, on the whole, it is. 

" What we want," wrote Henry Adams in 1862 to his brother 
Charles, " is a school. We want a national set of young men 
like ourselves or better, to start new influences not only in poli- 
tics, but in literature, in law, in society, and throughout the 
whole social organism of the country — a national school of our 
own generation. And that is what America has no power to 
create. . . . It's all random, insulated work, for special and 
temporary and personal purposes. And we have no means, 
power or hope of combined action for any unselfish end." 
That is what America has no power to create. But can it be 
said that any nation has ever created a school? Here we have 
the perfect illustration of that mass fatalism of which I have 
spoken, and Henry Adams himself, in his passivity, is the type 
of it. Secure as he was, uniquely secure, why did he refuse 
to accept the responsibility of those novels in which he ex- 
pressed the contempt of a powerful and cultivated mind for 
the meanness, the baseness, the vulgarity of the guiding ele- 
ment in American society? In the darkest and most chaotic 
hours of our spiritual history the individual has possessed a 
measure of free will only to renounce it: if Henry Adams had 
merely signed his work and accepted the consequences of it, he 
might by that very fact have become the founder, the centre, 
of the school that he desired. But it is true that in that gen- 
eration the impulses of youth were, with an extraordinary 
unanimity, focused upon a single end, the exploitation of the 
continent; the material opportunities that American life offered 



THE LITERARY LIFE 197 

were too great and too all-engrossing, and it is unlikely that 
any considerable minority could have been rallied for any non- 
utilitarian cause. Sixty years later this school remains, and 
quite particularly as regards our literature, the one thing neces- 
sary; the reforestation of our spiritual territory depends on 
it. And in more than one sense the times are favourable. The 
closing of the frontier seems to promise for this country an in- 
tenser life than it has known before; a large element of the 
younger generation, estranged from the present order, exists 
in a state of ferment that renders it highly susceptible to new 
ideas; the country literally swarms with half-artists, as one 
may call them, men and women, that is to say, who have ceased 
to conform to the law of the tribe but who have not accepted 
the discipline of their own individual spirits. " What I chiefly 
desire for you," wrote Ibsen to Brandes at the outset of his 
career, " is a genuine, full-blooded egoism^ which shall force 
you for a time to regard what concerns you yourself as the 
only thing of any consequence, and everything else as non- 
existent. . . . There is no way in which you can benefit so- 
ciety more than by coining the metal you have in yourself." 
The second half of this rather blunt counsel of perfection is 
implied in the first, and it connotes a world of things merely 
to name which would be to throw into relief the essential in- 
fantility of the American writer as we know the type. By 
what prodigies of alert self-adaptation, of discriminating self- 
scrutiny, of conscious effort does the creative will come into 
its own! As for us, weak as too many of us are, ignorant, iso- 
lated, all too easily satisfied, and scarcely as yet immune from 
the solicitations of the mob, we still have this advantage, that 
an age of reaction is an age that stirs the few into a conscious- 
ness of themselves. 

Van Wyck Brooks 



MUSIC 

WE spend more money upon music than does any other 
nation on earth; some of our orchestras, notably those 
of Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, are worthy to rank 
among the world's best; in the Metropolitan Opera House we 
give performances of grand opera that for consistent excel- 
lence of playing, singing, and mise-en-scene are surpassed prob- 
ably nowhere. Yet there has never been a successful opera 
by an American offered at that opera house, and the number 
of viable American orchestral works is small enough to be 
counted almost upon one's fingers. We squander millions 
every year upon an art that we cannot produce. 

There are apologists for the American composer who will 
say that we do produce it, but that it is strangled at birth. 
According to their stock argument, there are numberless greatly 
gifted native composers whose works never get a hearing, (a) 
because Americans are prejudiced against American music and 
in favour of foreign music, and (b) because the foreigners 
who largely control the musical situation in this country jeal- 
ously refuse to allow American works to be performed. This 
would be impressive if it were consistent or true. As far as 
concerns the Jealous Foreigner myth — he does not dominate 
the musical situation — I have never noticed that the average 
European in this country is deficient either in self-interest or 
tact. He is generally anxious, if only for diplomatic reasons, 
to find American music that is worth singing or playing. Even 
when he fails to find any that is worth performing, he often 
performs some that isn't, in order to satisfy local pride. More- 
over, Americans are no more prejudiced against American mu-' 
sicians than they are against other kinds. As a matter of fact, 
if intensive boosting campaigns produced creative artists, the 
American composer during the past decade should have ex- 
panded like a hot-house strawberry. We have had prize con- 
tests of all kinds, offering substantial sums for everything from 

199 



200 CIVILIZATION 

grand operas to string quartettes, we have had societies formed 
to publish his chamber-music scores; publishers have rushed to 
print his smaller works; we have had concerts of. American 
compositions; we have had all- American festivals. Meanwhile 
the American composer has, with a few lonely exceptions, ob- 
stinately refused to produce anything above the level of what 
it would be flattering to call mediocrity. 

No. If he is not heard oftener in concert halls and upon re- 
cital platforms, it is because he is not good enough. There is, 
in the music of even the second-rate Continental composers, a 
surety of touch, a quality of evident confidence in their ma- 
terial and ease in its handling that is rarely present in the work 
of Americans. Most American symphonic and chamber music 
lacks structure and clarity. The workmanship is faulty, the 
utterance stammers and halts. Listening to an average Ameri- 
can symphonic poem, you get the impression that the com- 
poser was so amazed and delighted at being able to write a 
symphonic poem at all that the fact that it might be a dull 
one seemed of minor importance to him. When he isn't 
being almost entirely formless he is generally safely conven- 
tional, preferring to stick to what a statesman would call the 
Ways of the Fathers rather than risk some structural innova- 
tion what might or might not be effective. Tschaikovsky's 
variation of the traditional sequence of movements in the 
Pathetique symphony, for example — ending with the slow 
movement instead of the march — would scandalize and terrify 
the average American. 

This feebleness and uncertainty in the handling of material 
makes American music sound more sterile and commonplace 
than it really is. The American composer never seems certain 
just what, if anything, he wants to say. His themes, his fun- 
damental ideas, are often of real significance, but he has no 
control over that very essence of the language of music, mood. 
He lacks taste. ' The fact that an American composition may 
begin in a genuinely impressive mood is no guarantee at all that 
inside of twenty-four bars it may not fall into the most ap- 
palling banalities. We start with lyric beauty and finish in 
stickiness. The curse of bathos is upon us. We lack staying 
power. Just as so many American dramatists can write two 



MUSIC 201 

good acts of a three-act play, so many American novelists can 
write superb opening chapters, so do American composers de- 
vise eloquent opening themes. But we all fail when it comes 
to development. ' The train is laid, the match is applied, and 
the spectators crowd back in delighted terror amid tremendous 
hissings and sputterings. But when the awaited detonation 
comes, it is too often only a pop. 

Such failure to make adequate use of his ideas is partially 
attributable to the American musician's pathetically inadequate 
technical equipment. Generally speaking, he doesn't know 
his business. He has been unable, or hasn't bothered, to learn 
his trade. Imagine if you can a successful dramatist who can 
neither read nor write, but has to dictate his plays, or a painter 
who can only draw the outlines of his pictures, hiring some one 
else to lay in the colours, and you have something analogous to 
many an American " composer " whose music is taken seriously 
by Americans, and who cannot write out a playable piano part, 
arrange a song for choral performance, or transcribe a hymn 
tune for a string quartette. Such elementary work he has to 
have done for him, whenever it is necessary, by some hack. 
This, to say nothing of the more advanced branches of musical 
science, like counterpoint, fugue, orchestration. Though it is 
risky to generalize, it is probably safe to say that among Amer- 
icans who write music, the man who can construct a respectable 
fugue or canon or score a piece for full orchestra is decidedly 
the exception. In Europe, of course, any man who did not 
have these technical resources at his fingertips would have to 
be a Moussorgsky to be taken seriously as a composer at all. 

It is not entirely the American's fault that he is so ill- 
equipped. Much of his comparative musical illiteracy, true, 
is the result of his own laziness and his traditional American 
contempt for theory and passion for results. On the other 
hand, the young American who honestly desires a good theo- 
retical training in music must either undertake the expensive 
adventure of journeying to one of the few cities that contain 
a first-class conservatory, or the equally expensive one of go- 
ing to Europe. If he can do neither, he musc to a great extent 
educate himself. Some kinds of training it is nearly impossible 
for him to obtain here at any price. Orchestration, for in- 



202 CIVILIZATION 

stance, a tremendously complex and difficult science, can be 
mastered only by the time-honoured trial and error method, 
i.e., by writing out scores and hearing them played. How is 
our young American to manage this? Granted that there is 
a symphony orchestra near him, how can he get his scores 
played? The conductor cannot be blamed for refusing. He 
is hired to play the works of masters, not to try out the ap- 
prentice efforts of unskilled aspirants. What we need so badly 
here are not more first-class orchestras, but more second-rate 
ones, small-town orchestras that could afford to give the tyro 
a chance. 

Because of their lack of technical skill many composers in 
this country never venture into the broader fields of composi- 
tion at all. As a class, we write short piano and violin pieces, 
or songs. We write them because we do earnestly desire to 
write something and because they do not demand the technical 
resourcefulness and sustained inspiration that we lack. Par- 
enthetically, I don't for a moment mean to imply that clumsy 
workmanship and sterility are unknown in Europe, that we are 
all mediocrities and they are all Uebermenschen. As a matter 
of fact, we have to-day probably much more creative musical 
talent, if less brains, than Europe; but, talent for talent, the 
European is infinitely better trained. This, at least in part, 
because he respects theory and has a desire for technical pro- 
ficiency that we almost totally lack. Then too, the European 
has some cultural background. There is a curious lack of in- 
ter-communication among the arts in this country. The painter 
seems to feel that literature has nothing direct to give him, the 
writer, that music and painting are not in his line, and the mu- 
sician — decidedly the worst of the three in this respect — that 
his own art has no connection with anything. 

The American composer's most complete failure is intellec- 
tual. The fact that he writes music seldom warrants the as- 
sumption that he has the artist's point of view at all. He is 
likely to be a much less interesting person than one's iceman. 
Ten to one, he never visits a picture gallery or a sculpture ex- 
hibition, his taste in the theatre is probably that of the tired 
business man, and what little reading he does is likely to be 
confined to trade papers. Snappy Stories, and best-sellers. He 



MUSIC 203 

takes no interest in politics, economics, or sociology, either na- 
tional or international (how could they possibly concern him?), 
and probably cannot discuss even music with pleasure or profit 
to anybody. 

The natural inference that might be drawn from this diatribe 
— that the composing of music in this country is confined ex- 
clusively to the idiot classes^s not strictly true. Plenty of 
American musicians are intelligent and cultured men as well; 
but that is not America's fault. She is just as cordial to the 
stupid ones. And the widespread impotence and technical 
sloppiness of American music is the inevitable result of the 
American attitude toward music and to the anomalous position 
the art occupies in this country. 

Let me be platitudinous in the interest of clarity and point 
out what we so often forget: that our nation, unlike most of 
the others, is not a race as well. We have common wellsprings 
of thought, but — and this is significant and ominous — none of 
feeling. Sheer environment may teach people to think alike 
within a generation; but it takes centuries of common emo- 
tional experiences to make them feel alike. Any average Amer- 
ican, even of the National-Security-League-one-hundred-per- 
centum variety, may have in his veins the blood of English, 
French, Italian, and Russian ancestors, and there is no saying 
that his emotional nature is going to find many heart-beats in 
common with some equally average neighbour, whose ancestry 
may be, say, Irish, Danish, and Hungarian. What national 
spirit we have has been determined, first, by the fact that the 
ancestors of every one of us, whether they came here twenty 
years ago or two hundred, were pioneers. Every one of them 
left a civilization whose cultural background had been estab- 
lished for centuries, to come to a land where the problem of 
mere existence was of prime importance. Again, many of them 
were religious fanatics. In the life of the pioneer there was 
little room for art of any sort, and least for music. What he 
demanded of music, when he had time to spare for it, was that 
above all things it distract him from the fatigue and worry of 
everyday life, either by amusing him or by furnishing a senti- 
mental reminder of old ways. To the Puritan, music, both for 
its own sake and as entertainment, was anathema. As sensuous 



204 CIVILIZATION 

beauty it was popish, and as entertainment it was worldly 
pleasure, and therefore wicked. To be tolerated at all, it must 
be practical, i.e., perform some moral service by being a hymn 
tune. And what the American pioneer and the American Puri- 
tan asked a few generations back, the average American asks 
to-day whenever he is confronted with any work of art: Does 
it point a moral? If not, will it help me to kill time without 
boring me? 

Instruction, release, or amusement: that, in general, is all 
we want of art. The American's favourite picture is one that 
tells a story, or shows the features of some famous person, or 
the topography of some historic spot. Fantastic pictures he 
likes, because they show him people and places far removed 
from his own rather tedious environment, but they must be a 
gaudy, literal, solid sort of fantasy — Maxfield Parrish rather 
than Aubrey Beardsley. If he can't have these, he wants 
pretty girls or comics. Purely decorative or frankly meaning- 
less pictures — Hokusai and Whistler (except, of course, the 
portraits of Carlyle and his mother) — do not exist for him. 
Sculpture — which he does not understand — is probably his fa- 
vourite art-form, for it is tangible, three-dimensionable, stable. 
He doesn't mind poetry, for it, too, gives him release. He likes 
novels, especially " glad " ones or mystery stories. He even 
tolerates realism if, as in " Main Street," it gives him release 
by showing him a set of consistently contemptible and uncul- 
tured characters to whom even he must feel superior. His 
architecture he likes either ornate to imbecility or utilitarian 
to hideousness. 

In other words, the typical American goes to an art-work 
either frankly to have his senses tickled or for the sake of a 
definite thing that it says or a series of extraneous images or 
thoughts that it evokes — never for the Ding an sick. Of pure 
aesthetic emotion he exhibits very little. To him, beauty is 
emphatically not its own excuse for being. He does not want 
it for its own sake, and distrusts and fears it when it appears 
before him unclothed in moral lessons or associated ideas. In 
such a civilization music can occupy but a very unimportant 
place. For music is, morally or intellectually, the most mean- 
ingless of arts: it teaches no lesson, it offers no definite escape 



MUSIC 205 

from life to the literal-minded, and aside from the primitive 
and obvious associations of patriotic airs and " mother " songs, 
it evokes no associated images or ideas. To love music you 
must be willing to enjoy beauty pretty largely for its own sake, 
without asking it to mean anything definite in words or pic- 
tures. This the American hates to do. Since he cannot be edi- 
fied, he refuses to be stirred. There is nothing left for him, 
therefore, in music, except such enjoyment as he can get out 
of a pretty tune or an infectious rhythm. 

And that, despite our admirable symphony orchestras and 
our two superb permanent opera companies (all run at a loss, 
by the way), is about all that music means to the average 
American — amusement. He simply does not see how an art 
that doesn't teach him anything, that is a shameless assault 
upon his emotions (he makes no distinction between emotions 
and senses), can possibly play any significant part in his life. 
So, as a nation, he does what he generally does in other mat- 
ters of art, delegates its serious cultivation to women. 

Women constitute ninety per cent, of those who support 
music in this country. It is women who attend song and in- 
strumental recitals; it is women who force reluctant husbands 
and fathers to subscribe for opera seats and symphony con- 
certs; the National Federation of Musical Clubs, which works 
throughout the country to foster the appreciation of music, is 
composed entirely of women; at least two-thirds of the choral 
organizations in the United States contain women's voices only. 
It is no disparagement of their activities to say that such a 
state of affairs is unhealthy. This well-nigh complete femini- 
zation of music is bad for it. After all, art, to be alive, must 
like any other living thing be the result of collaboration. 
Women have undertaken to be the moral guardians of the race, 
and no one can deny that they guard, upon the whole, as well 
as men could; but their guardianship is a bit too zealous at 
times, and their predominance in our musical life aggravates 
our already exaggerated tendency to demand that art be edi- 
fying. One of the conditions of the opera contest conducted 
by the National Federation in 1914 was that the libretto must 
contain nothing immoral or suggestive (I paraphrase). Now 
music is, after all, an adult occupation, and it might be assumed 



2o6 CIVILIZATION 

that a composer competent to write an opera score might have 
taste and intelligence enough not to be vulgar — for, surely, vul- 
garity was all they wanted to guard against. If the clause 
were to be interpreted literally, it would bar the librettos of 
Tristan, Walkure, Carmen, Pelleas et Melisande, and L'Amore 
dei Tre Re — a supposition quite too unthinkable. The femi- 
nine influence helps to increase the insularity of our musicians. 
Women are more chauvinistic in art matters — if possible — than 
men, and among the women's clubs that are trying to encour- 
age the American composer there is a tendency to insist rather 
that he be American than that he be a composer. Since it is 
women who support our recitals and concerts it is they who 
must assume responsibility for our excessive cult of the per- 
former. This land is certainly the happy hunting-ground of the 
virtuoso, be he singer, player, or conductor. What he chooses to 
sing, play, or conduct is comparatively unimportant to us. Our 
audiences seem to gather not so much to listen as to look; or if 
they do listen, it is to the voice or the instrument rather than 
to the music. The announcement, " Farrar in Carmen " will 
pack the Metropolitan to the doors; but if the bill be changed, 
and Zaza be substituted at the last moment, who cares? 
Indeed the ticket agencies, knowing what people really attend 
opera for, frankly advertise " tickets for Farrar to-night." 
Rachmaninoff is a great pianist, and Rachmaninoff playing an 
all-Chopin programme could fill Carnegie Hall at any time. 
But Rachmaninoff playing a programme of Czerny's " Exer- 
cises for the Beginner " could fill it just as well. Announce an 
all-Chopin programme without naming the pianist, and see how 
much of an audience you draw. The people who go to hear 
Galli-Curci sing the shadow-song from Dinora do not go to hear 
music at all. They go as they would go to see Bird Millman 
walk a slack wire; they go to hear a woman prove that, given 
a phenomenal development of the vocal cords, she can, after 
years of practice, perform scales and trills in altissimo very 
nearly as well as the union flute-player who furnishes her ob- 
ligato. All this is to a certain extent true elsewhere, of course. 
It is natural that if one person can sing or play better than 
another, audiences should prefer to hear him rather than an- 
other. But this worship of the performance rather than the 



MUSIC 207 

thing performed, this blind adoration of skill for its own sake, 
is cultivated in America to a degree that is quite unparalleled. 

Many American cities and large towns hold annual musical 
festivals, lasting from two days to a week or more, and these 
are often mentioned as evidence of the existence of a genuine 
musical culture among us. Are they? What happens at them? 
For one thing, the local choral society performs a cantata or 
oratorio. This is more than likely to be either The Messiah or 
Elijah, works which through long association have taken on 
less the character of musical compositions than of devotional 
exercises. Edification again. Soloists are engaged, as expen- 
sive and famous as the local budget allows, and these give re- 
citals during the remaining sessions of the festival. The 
audiences come largely to see these marvels rather than to 
hear music, for after the annual spree of culture is over they 
return home contentedly enough to another year void of any 
music whatever. Hearing a little music is better than hearing 
none, but the test of genuine culture is whether or not it is an 
integral part of life rather than a vacation from it. By this 
test the annual festival would seem to exert about as much per- 
manent cultural influence as a clambake. 

The total unconsciousness on the part of his fellow-country- 
men that art is related to life, a sense of futility and unreality, 
is what makes the lot of the musician in America a hard one, 
and is responsible for his failure as an artist. If people get 
the kind of government they deserve, they most certainly get 
the kind of art they demand; and if, comparatively speaking, 
there is no American composer, it is because America doesn't 
want him, doesn't see where he fits in. 

Suppose most American music is trivial and superficial? 
How many Americans would know the difference if it were 
profound? The composer here lives in an atmosphere that is, 
at the worst, good-natured contempt. Contempt, mind you, 
not for himself — that wouldn't matter — but for his very art. 
In the minds of many of his compatriots it ranks only as an 
entertainment and a diversion, slightly above embroidery and 
unthinkably below baseball. At best, what he gets is unintel- 
ligent admiration, not as an artist, but as a freak. Blind Tom, 
the negro pianist, is still a remembered and admired figure in 



2o8 CIVILIZATION 

American musical history; and Blind Tom was an idiot. To 
an American, the process of musical composition is a mys- 
terious and incomprehensible trick — like sword-swallowing or 
levitation — and as such he admires it; but he does not respect 
it. He cannot understand how any normal he-man can spend 
his life thinking up tunes and putting them down on paper. 
Tunes are pleasant things, of course, especially when they 
make your feet go or take you back to the days when you went 
straw-riding; but as for taking them seriously, and calling it 
work — man's work — to think them up . . . any one who 
thinks that can be dismissed as a crank. 

If the crank could make money, it might be different. 
The respect accorded to artists in our country is pretty sharply 
graded in accordance with their earning power. Novelists and 
playwrights come first, since literature and the stage are known 
to furnish a " good living." Sculptors have a certain standing, 
on account of the rumoured prices paid for statues and public 
memorials, though scenario writers are beginning to rank 
higher. Painters are eyed with a certain suspicion, though 
there is always the comfortable belief that the painter prob- 
ably pursues a prosperous career of advertising art on the side. 
But poets and composers are decidedly men not to be taken 
seriously. This system of evaluation is not quite as crass as 
it sounds. America has so long been the land of opportunity, 
we have so long gloried in her supremacy as the place to make 
a living, that we have an instinctive conviction that if a man 
is really doing a good job he must inevitably make money at 
it. Only, poetry and music have the bad luck to be arts where- 
in a man may be both great and successful and still be unable 
to look the landlord in the eye. Since such trades are so 
unprofitable, we argue, those who pursue them are presumably 
incompetent. The one class of composer whom the American 
does take seriously is the writer of musical comedy and popu- 
lar songs, not only because he can make money, but because 
he provides honest, understandable entertainment for man and 
beast. That, perhaps, is why our light music is the best of its 
kind in the world. 

The self-styled music-lover in this country too often brings 
little more genuine comprehension to music. He is likely to be 



MUSIC 209 

a highbrow (defined as a person educated beyond his intelli- 
gence), with all the mental obtuseness and snobbishness of his 
class. He divides music into " popular " — meaning light — 
and " classical " — meaning pretentious. Now there is good 
music and bad, and the composer's pretensions have little to do 
with the case. Compare, for example, the first-act finale of 
Victor Herbert's Mile. Modiste with such vulgar rubbish as 
Donna ^ mobile. Yet because the latter is sung by tenors, 
at the Metropolitan, the highbrow solemnly catalogues it as 
" classical," abolishing the work of Herbert, Berlin, and Kern, 
three greatly gifted men, with the adjective " popular," In 
general, he is the faithful guardian of the Puritan tradition, 
always sniffing the air for a definite " message " or moral, seek- 
ing sermons in tones, books in running >arpeggios. It never 
occurs to him that just as words are the language of intellect, 
so is music the language of emotion, that its whole excuse for 
existence is its perfection in saying what lies just beyond and 
above words, and that if you can reduce a composer's message 
to words, you automatically render it meaningless. 

Music criticism in America is amazingly good in the cities. 
The system under which the critics must work, however, 
whereby they are supposed to " cover " everything (in New 
York this theoretically entails making some sort of critical 
comment upon every one of three or four hundred events in a 
single season) is so impossible that much of their work is in- 
evitably scamped and perfunctory. Elsewhere throughout the 
country criticism is handed over to reporters, who generally 
avoid trouble by approving of everything. There is a tendency 
toward the double standard — holding the stranger strictly to 
account, especially the foreigner, and being " nice " to the 
native — that produces demoralizing results. 

Of real musical journalism we have none. There is The 
Musical Quarterly, good of its kind, but rather ponderous and 
making no pretence to timeliness. The monthlies are chiefly 
for the teacher. The weeklies are in general frankly " shop " 
organs, devoted to the activities of the performer and filled 
with his advertisements, portraits, and press notices. There 
is no medium for the exchange of contemporary thought, for 
the discussion of topics having a non-professional cultural in- 



210 CIVILIZATION 

terest. Music publishing here is an industry, conducted like 
any other industry. The Continental type of publisher, who 
is a scholar and a musician, and a gentleman who is conscious 
of a duty to music as well as to the stockholders, is almost 
unknown here. To our publishers music is a commodity, to 
be bought cheap and sold dear, and most of them will publish 
anything that looks profitable, regardless of its quality. Their 
typographical standards are higher than those anywhere in the 
world, except Germany. 

So the American composer in America works more or less in 
a vacuum. He is out of things, and he knows it. If he at- 
tempts to say something, through his art, that will be intel- 
ligible to his countrymen, he is baffled by the realization that 
his countrymen don't understand his language. This particu- 
lar difficulty, this sense of inarticulateness, probably weighed 
less heavily upon the last two generations of American com- 
posers; for they were, most cf them, virtually German com- 
posers. In their time a thorough technical education in music 
was so nearly unobtainable here that it was simpler to go 
abroad for it. So, from Paine to MacDowell, they went to 
Germany. There they learned their trade, and at least learned 
it thoroughly; but they learned to write, not only music, but 
German music. To them, German music was music. Their 
songs were Lieder; their symphonies and overtures were little 
sinister sons of Beethoven, Raff, and Brahms. So completely 
Teutonized did our musical speech become that we still find 
it hard to believe that French music, Spanish music, Russian 
music is anything but an imperfect translation from the Ger- 
man. A few went to Paris and learned to write with a French 
accent. MacDowell was, and remains, our best: a first-rank 
composer, who died before his work was done. His earlier 
music was all written, performed, and published in Germany, 
and it is as echt Deutsch as that of Raff, his master. Not until 
he approached middle life did he evolve a musical idiom that 
was wholly of MacDowell, the American. Most of the rest 
came back to spend their days fashioning good, honest, square- 
toed Kapellmeisfermusik that had about as much genuine rela- 
tion to their America as the Declaration of Independence has 
to ours. They might feel this lack of contact, but at least 



MUSIC 211 

they had the consolation of knowing that there were people 
in the world to whom what they said was at least intelligible. 

The American of the present generation has no such consola- 
tion. He has probably not been trained abroad. He wants to 
write music, and being human, he wants it understood. But 
the minute he tries to express himself he betrays the fact that 
he does not know what he wants to express. Any significant 
work of art is inevitably based on the artist's relation and re- 
action to life. But the American composer's relation to the 
common life is unreal. His activities strike his fellows as un- 
important and slightly irrational. He can't lay his finger upon 
the great, throbbing, common pulse of America because for 
him there is none. So he tries this, that, and the other, hoping 
by luck to stumble upon the thing he wants to say. He tries 
desperately to be American. Knowing that the great national 
schools of music in other countries are based upon folksong, he 
tries to find the American folksong, so as to base his music 
upon that. He utilizes Negro tunes, and when they fail to 
strike the common chord he devises themes based upon Indian 
melodies. What he fails to see is that the folksongs of Europe 
express the common racial emotions of a nation, not its geo- 
graphical accidents. When a Frenchman hears Malbrouck he 
is moved by what moved generations of long-dead Frenchmen; 
when a Russian hears Dubinushka he is stirred by what has 
stirred Russians for centuries. But even if some melody did 
stir the pulse of Geronimo, the mere fact that he was a for- 
mer resident of my country is no proof that it is going to stir 
mine. If you insist that Negro music is the proper basis for 
an American school of composition, try telling a Southerner 
that when he hears Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, he is hearken- 
ing to the voices of his ancestors! 

A curious symptom of this feeling of disinheritance is the 
tendency of so many Americans to write what might be called 
the music of escape, music that far from attempting to affirm 
the composer's relation to his day and age is a deliberate at- 
tempt to liberate himself by evoking alien and exotic moods 
and atmosphere. The publishers' catalogues are full of Arab 
meditations, Persian dances, Hindu serenades, and countless 
similar attempts to get " anywhere out of the world." The 



212 CIVILIZATION 

best work of Charles Griffes, whose untimely death last year 
robbed us of a true creative talent, was his symphonic poem, 
" The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan," and his settings of 
Chinese and Japanese lyrics in Oriental rhythms and timbres. 
Not that the mere choice of subject is important; it is the ac- 
tual mood and idiom of so much of this music that is signifi- 
cant evidence of the impulse to give up and forget America, 
to create a dream-world wherein one can find refuge from the 
land of chewing gum and victrolas. 

These same victrolas, by the way, with their cousin, the 
player-piano, which so outrage the sensibilities of many a mu- 
sician of the elder day, are a very real force in helping to 
civilize this country musically. The American is by no means 
as unmusical as he thinks he is. His indifference to art is only 
the result of his purely industrial civilization, and his tendency 
to mix morals with aesthetics is a habit of thought engendered 
by his ancestry. The Puritan tradition makes him fearful 
and suspicious of any sort of sensuous or emotional response, 
but it has not rendered him incapable of it. Catch him off his 
guard, get him away from the fear of being bored, and he is 
far from insensitive to music. He buys victrola records be- 
cause he is a hero-worshipper, because he wants to hear the 
expensive Caruso and Kreisler and McCormack; but inevitably 
he is bound to take some notice of what they play and sing, 
and to recognize it when he hears it again. In spite of him- 
self he begins to acquire a rudimentary sort of musical back- 
ground. He begins by buying jazz rolls for his player-piano, 
and is likely in the long run, if only out of curiosity, to pro- 
gress from " blues " to Chopin, via Moszkovski and Grainger. 

But the greatest present-day force for good, musically, in this 
country, is the large motion-picture house. Music has always 
been a necessary accompaniment to motion pictures, in order 
to compensate for the uncanny silence in which these photo- 
graphic wraiths unfold their dramas. Starting with a modest 
ensemble of piano and glass crash, the motion-picture orchestra 
has gradually increased in size and quality, the pipe organ has 
been introduced to augment and alternate it, so that the larger 
houses to-day can boast a musical equipment that is amazingly 
good. A few years ago S. L. Rothafel devised a glorified tjrpe 



MUSIC 213 

of entertainment that was a sort of combination picture-show 
and " pop " concert. He built a theatre, the Rialto, especially 
to house it, containing a stage that was little more than a pic- 
ture frame, a large pipe organ, and an orchestra platform large 
enough to hold seventy or eighty players. He recruited a per- 
manent orchestra large enough to play symphonic works, and 
put Hugo Riesenfeld, an excellent violinist and conductor, who 
had been trained under Arthur Nikisch, in charge of the per- 
formances. These, besides the usual film presentations, com- 
prised vocal and instrumental solos and detached numbers by 
the orchestra. All the music played at these entertainments 
was good — in what is known in this country as " classical." 
Riesenfeld devised a running accompaniment to the films, as- 
sembled from the best orchestral music obtainable — a sort of 
synthetic symphonic poem that fitted the mood and action of 
the film presented, and was, of course, much too good for it. 

This new entertainment form was instantly successful, and 
is rapidly becoming the standard offering at all the larger pic- 
ture houses. It is a significant step in our musical life, for it is 
the first entirely successful attempt in this country to adapt 
art to popular wants. At last the average man is going of 
his own accord into a public hall and hearing music — real music 
— and discovering that he likes it. The picture house allows 
him to pretend that he is going solely to see the films, and 
needn't listen unless he wants to. He finds that " classical " 
music is not nearly so boresome as many of its admirers. 
Freed from the highbrow's condescension, unconscious of up- 
lift, he listens and responds to music like the prelude to Tris- 
tan, the Walkurenritt, the New World symphony, Tschaikov- 
sky's Fourth, and the Eroica. Theodore Thomas rendered no 
more valuable service to music in America than have Samuel 
Rothafel and Hugo Riesenfeld. 

We are still far from Utopia, however. In one of his essays ^ 
upon communal art Henry Caro-Delvaille speaks of " the true'^ 
Mediterranean esprit, the viable art philosophy of the French 
race, which is essentially plastic, accepting and delineating life, 
free alike from dogmatism and mysticism." Try to frame a 
sentence like that about America. Try to make any generaliza- 
tion about the American spirit without using " liberty," " free 



214 CIVILIZATION 

institutions," " resourcefulness," " opportunity," or other poli- 
tico-economic terms, if you would know what confronts the 
American artist, above all the American musician, when he 
attempts to become articulate to his countrymen. We simply 
have no common aesthetic emotions. No wonder our music 
flounders and stammers, and trails off into incoherence! 

Wagner wrote Die Meister singer in a deliberate effort to 
express the German artistic creed; Verdi wrote consciously as 
an Italian; Glinka founded an entire school of composers whose 
sole aim was to express Russia. Such a task is beyond the 
American. The others were spokesmen for a race: he has 
no race to speak for, and the moment he pretends that he has, 
and tries to speak for it, he becomes conscious and futile. To 
speak of American music, in any ethnic sense, is na'ive; you 
might as well speak of Baptist music. No. The American 
must accept his lot. There is but one audience he can write 
for, and that is himself. John Smith, American composer, 
dare not say: " I write to express America." He can only 
say: " I write to express John Smith. I accept my life be- 
cause, after all, it is mine, and I interpret my life because it 
is the only life I know." And because John Smith is an 
American, and because somewhere, remote and inarticulate, 
there must be an American soul, then perhaps, if he does 
honest work and is true to himself, he may succeed in saying 
something that is of America, and of nowhere else, and that 
other Americans will hear and understand. 

Deems Taylor 



POETRY 

THERE are many fashions, among contemporary critics, 
of regarding American poetry, each of them perhaps of 
equal helpfulness, since each is one facet of an imaginable 
whole. There is the view of Mr. John Middleton Murry, 
an English critic, that it depends perhaps a shade too much 
on narrative or dramatic interest, on bizarrerie (if I may very 
freely elaborate his notion) or, in general, on a kind of sensa- 
tionalism, a use of superficially intriguing elements which are 
not specifically the right — or at all events the best — elements 
of poetry. There is the view of Mr. Louis Untermeyer, one of 
the ablest of our own critics and also one of the most versatile 
of our parodists and poets, that our contemporary poetry is 
good in measure as it comes in the direct line from Whitman: 
good, that is to say, when it is the voice of the poet who ac- 
cepts, accepts joyously and largely, even loosely, this new 
world environment, these new customs, social and industrial, 
above all, it may be, the new sense of freedom which he might, 
if pressed, trace back to Karl Marx on one hand and Sigmund 
Freud on the other. There is again the view of Miss Amy 
Lowell that our poetry is good, or tends to be, precisely in 
proportion as it represents an outgrowing, by the poet, of his 
acute awareness of a social or ethical " here and now," and the 
attainment of a relatively pure pre-occupation with beauty — 
the sense of freedom here exercising itself principally, if not 
altogether, with regard to literary tradition, especially the Eng- 
lish: once more, I dilate the view to make it the more broadly 
representative. And there is, finally, the view of the conser- 
vative, by no means silent even in this era, that what is good 
in contemporary American poetry is what is for the moment 
least conspicuous — the traditional, seen as it appears inevi- 
tably in America to be seen, as something graceful, sentimental, 
rightly ethical, gently idealistic. 

215 



2i6 CIVILIZATION 

What will be fairly obvious is that if we follow a little way 
any particular one of these critics, we shall find him attempt- 
ing to urge our poetry in a particular direction, a direction 
which he prefers to any other direction, and analysing its 
origins in such a way, if he analyses at all, as to make plausible 
its (postulated) growth in that direction. This is the natural, 
even perhaps the best thing, for a participant critic to do — 
it contributes, certainly, an interest and an energy. But if in 
some freak of disinterestedness, we wish if for only a moment 
to see American poetry with no concern save that of inordinate 
and intelligent curiosity, then it is to all of these views that 
we must turn, rather than to any one, and to the obverse of 
each, as well as to the face. For if one thing is apparent to-day 
in a study of American letters, it is that we must heroically 
resist any temptation to simplify, to look in only one direction 
for origins or in only one direction for growth. Despite our 
national motto, American civilization is not so much one in 
many as many in one. We have not, as England has and as 
France has, a single literary heart; our literary capitals and 
countries are many, each with its own vigorous people, its own 
self-interest, its own virtues and provincialisms. We may at- 
tribute this to the mere matter of our size, and the consequent 
geographical sequestration of this or that group — that is 
no doubt a factor, but of equal importance is the fact that 
in a new country, of rapid and chaotic material growth, 
we must inevitably have, according to the locality, marked 
variations in the rapidity of growth of the vague thing we call 
civilization. Chicago is younger than Boston, older than San 
Francisco. And what applies to the large unit applies also 
to the small — if the country in general has not yet reached 
anything remotely like a cultural homogeneity (as far, that is, 
as we ever in viewing a great nation expect such a thing) neither 
has any section of it, nor any city of it. It is no longer pos- 
sible, if indeed it ever was, to regard a section like New Eng- 
land, for example, as a definite environmental factor, say " y," 
and to conclude, as some critics are so fond of doing, that any 
poet who matures there will inevitably be representable as 
" yp." This is among the commonest and falsest of false 
simplifications. Our critics, frantically determined to find an 



POETRY 217 

American poetry that is autochthonous, will see rocky pas- 
tures, mountains and birches in the poetry of a New Englander, 
or skyscrapers in the poetry of a New Yorker, or stockyards 
in the poetry of a Chicagoan, as easily as a conjurer takes 
a rabbit from a hat. 

What refuge we have from a critical basis so naive is in 
assuming from the outset, toward contemporary American 
poetry, an attitude guardedly pluralistic — we begin by observ- 
ing merely that American poetry is certainly, at the moment, 
if quantitative production and public interest are any measure, 
extraordinarily healthy and vigorous. We are accustomed to 
hearing it called a renaissance. The term is admissible if we 
carefully exclude, in using it, any implication of a revival of 
classicism. What we mean by it is simply that the moment is 
one of quite remarkable energy, productiveness, range, colour, 
and anarchy. What we do not mean by it is that we can trace 
with accuracy where this outburst comes from. The origins of 
the thing are obscure. It was audible in 1914 — Mr. Edwin 
Arlington Robinson and Mr. Ezra Pound were audible before 
that; it burst into full chorus in 191 5; and ever since there 
has been, with an occasional dying fall, a lusty corybantic 
cacophony. Just where this amazing procession started nobody 
clearly knows. Mr. Untermeyer would have us believe that 
Walt Whitman was, as it were, the organizer of it, Miss Mon- 
roe tries to persuade us that it was Poetry: a Magazine of 
Verse. But the facts, I think, wave aside either postulate. 
If one thing is remarkable it is that in this spate of poetry the 
influence of Walt Whitman — an influence, one would suppose, 
as toxic for the young as Swinburne — is so inconsiderable: if 
another is even more remarkable, it is that in all this chorus 
one so seldom hears a voice of which any previous American 
voice was the clear prototype. We have had, of course, our 
voices — of the sort, I mean, rich enough in character to make 
imitation an easy and tempting thing. Longfellow, Lowell, 
Bryant, Sill, Lanier are not in this regard considerable, — but 
what of Poe, whose influence we have seen in French poetry 
on Baudelaire, and in contemporary English poetry on Mr. 
Walter de la Mare? No trace of him is discoverable, unless 
perhaps we find the ghostliest of his shadows now and then 



2i8 CIVILIZATION 

across the work of Mr. John Gould Fletcher, or Mr. Maxwell 
Bodenheim, or Mr. Wallace Stevens, a shadow cast, in all 
these cases, amid much else, from a technical and colouristic 
standpoint, which would have filled Poe with alarm. And 
there is another American poet, perhaps as great as Poe, per- 
haps greater (as he in turn is perhaps greater than Whitman 
— as poet, though not as personality) — Emily Dickinson. Of 
that quietist and mystic, who walked with tranquillity mid- 
way between Blake and Emerson, making of her wilful im- 
perfections a kind of perfectionism, why do we hear so little? 
Do we catch now and again the fleetingest glimpse of her in 
the early work of Mr. Robert Frost? If so, it is certainly 
nowhere else. Yet it would be hard to prove that she has no 
right to a place with Poe and Whitman, or indeed among the 
best poets in the language. 

But nowhere in America can we find, for contemporary 
poetry, any clear precursive signal. Little as it may comfort 
our fuglemen of the autochthonous, we must, I think, look to 
Europe for its origins. This is not, as some imagine, a dis- 
grace — it would be a melancholy thing, of course, if we merely 
imitated the European, without alteration. But Browning 
would hardly recognize himself, even if he cared to, in the 
" Domesday Book " of Mr. Edgar Lee Masters, Mallarme and 
Rimbaud would find Mr. Fletcher a mirror with an odd trick 
of distortion, Laforgue would have to look twice at Mr. T. S. 
Eliot's "Prufrock" (for all its Hamletism), M. Paul Fort 
would scarcely feel at home in Miss Amy Lowell's " Can 
Grande's Castle," Mr. Thomas Hardy and the ghost of Ten- 
nyson would not quarrel much for the possession of Mr. Rob- 
inson's work, nor Mr. Chesterton and the author of " The 
Ingoldsby Legends " for the lively sonorities of Mr. Vachel 
Lindsay. In such cases we have not so much " influence " as 
fertilization. It is something of Mr. Masters that " The Ring 
and the Book " reveals to Mr. Masters: something of Miss 
Lowell to which M. Paul Fort offers her the key. Was it a 
calamity for Baudelaire that he lived only by a transfusion of 
blood from an American? Is Becquer the less Becquer or 
Spanish for having fed upon the " Buch der Lieder "? . . . 
Culture is bartered, nowadays, at open frontiers, and if to-day 



POETRY 219 

a new theme, chord, or colour-scheme is French, German, or 
American, to-morrow it is international. 

If we differ in this respect from any other country it is only 
that we are freer to exploit, really exhaust, the new, because 
we hold, less than any other, to any classical traditions: for 
traditions our poets seldom look back further than the 19th 
century. We have the courage, often indistinguishable frort 
folly, of our lack of convictions. Thus it comes about that as 
America is the melting-pot for races, so she is in a fair way 
to become a melting-pot for cultures: we have the energy, the 
curiosity, the intelligence, above all the lack of affiliations with 
the past, which admirably adapt us to a task — so precisely 
demanding complete self-surrender — of aesthetic experiment. 
Ignorance has some compensations — I mean, of course, a par- 
tial ignorance. If Mr. Lindsay had been brought up exclu- 
sively on Aristotle, Plato, iEschylus, and Euripides, and had 
been taken out of the shadow of the church by Voltaire and 
Darwin, perhaps he would not have been so " free " to experi- 
ment with the " higher vaudeville." It will be observed that 
this is an odd kind of " freedom," for it amounts in some ways 
to little more than the " freedom " of the prison. For if too 
severe a training in the classics unfits one somewhat for bold 
experiment, too little of it is as likely, on the other hand, to 
leave one with an aesthetic perceptiveness, a sensibility, in 
short, relatively rudimentary. 

This, then, is something of the cultural mise en sc^ne for our 
contemporary poetry. We have repeated waves of European 
suggestion breaking Westward over our continent, foaming 
rather more in Chicago than in New York; and we have our 
lusty young company of swimmers, confident that they are 
strong enough to ride these waves farther than any one in 
Europe rode them and with a more native grace. What is 
most conspicuously American in most of these swimmers is 
the fact that they rely not so much on skill and long training 
as on sheer energy, vitality, and confidence. They rely, in- 
deed, in most cases, on a kind of exuberance or superabun- 
dance. Do we not feel this in the work of Mr. Edgar Lee 
Masters — does he not try, in these many full books of his, 
where the good is so inextricably enmeshed with the bad, sim- 



2 20 CIVILIZATION 

ply to beat us down as under a cataract? " Domesday Book " 
is, rather^ an avalanche. He never knows what to exclude, 
where to stop. Miss Lowell, Mr. Fletcher, Mr. Carl Sand- 
burg, and Mr. Lindsay are not far behind him, either — they 
are all copious. I do not mean to imply that this is a bad 
thing, at the moment — at the moment I am not sure that this 
sheer exuberance is not, for us, the very best thing. Energy 
is the first requisite of a " renaissance," and supplies its mate- 
rial, or, in another light, its richness of colour. Not the be- 
ginning, but the end, of a renaissance is in refinement; and 
I think we are certainly within bounds in postulating that the 
last five years have given us at the least a superb beginning, 
and enough more than that, perhaps, to make one wonder 
whether we have not already cast Poe and Whitman, Sidney 
Lanier, and Emily Dickinson, our strange little quartette, into 
a shadow. 

All that our wonder can hope for is at best a very specu- 
lative answer. If parallels were not so dangerous, we might 
look with encouragement at that spangled rhetorical torrent 
which w^e call Elizabethan literature. Ben Jonson did not con- 
sider Shakespeare much of an artist, nor did Milton, and clas- 
sicists ever since have followed them in that opinion. If one 
can be the greatest of poets and yet not much of an artist, we 
may here keep clear of the quarrel : what we get at is the fact 
that Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans participated in a 
literary movement which, like ours, began in energy, violence, 
and extravagance, was at its best excessively rhetorical and 
given to unpruned copiousness, and perished as it refined. 
Will a future generation see us in a somewhat similar light — 
will it like us for our vitality, for the reckless adventurousness 
of our literature, our extravagances, and forgive us, if it does 
not precisely enjoy as something with a foreign flavour, our 
artistic innocence? That is conceivable, certainly. Yet the 
view is speculative and we dare not take it too seriously. For 
if we have kept hopefully and intelligently abreast of the 
contemporary we have kept, none the less, our own very suffi- 
cient aloofness, our own tactilism and awareness, in the light 
of which we are bound to have our own scepticisms and self- 
distrust. I do not mean that we would perhaps prefer some- 



POETRY 221 

thing more classical or severe than " Spoon River Anthology " 
or " The Congo " or the colour symphonies of Mr. Fletcher, 
merely on the ground that it is the intrinsically classical and 
severe which we most desire. What we seem to see in con- 
temporary American poetry is a transition from the more to 
the less exuberant, from the less to the more severe; and what 
we most desire to see is the attainment of that point, in this 
transition, which will give us our parallel to the Shakespearean, 
if we may hope for anything even approximately so high; a 
point of equipoise. 

This hope gives us a convenient vantage from which to 
survey the situation, if we also keep in mind our perception of 
American cultural heterogeneity and the rashness of any at- 
tempt to generalize about it. The most exact but least divert- 
ing method would be the merely enumerative, the mere roll- 
call which would put before us Mr. Edwin Arlington Robin- 
son and Mr. Ezra Pound as the two of our poets whose public 
literary activities extend farthest back, and after them the 
group who made themselves known in the interval between 
1914 and 1920: Mr. Robert Frost, Mr. Fletcher, Mr. Masters, 
Mr. Sandburg, Miss Lowell, Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Alfred Kreym- 
borg, Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim, Mr. Wallace Stevens, " H. D.," 
Mr. T. S. Eliot, and Miss Sara Teasdale. These poets, with 
few exceptions, have little enough in common — nothing, per- 
haps, save the fact that they were all a good deal actuated at 
the outset by a disgust with the dead level of sentimentality 
and prettiness and moralism to which American poetry had 
fallen between 1890 and 1910. From that point they diverge 
like so many radii. One cannot say, as Miss Lowell has tried 
to persuade us, that they have all followed one radius, and 
that the differences between them are occasioned by the fact 
that some have gone farther than others. We may, for con- 
venience, classify them, if we do not attach too much impor- 
tance to the bounds of our classes. We may say that Mr. 
Robinson, Mr. Frost, and Mr. Masters bring back to our 
poetry a strong sense of reality; that Mr. Fletcher, Mr. Pound, 
Miss Lowell, " H. D.," and Mr. Bodenheim bring to it a sharp- 
ened consciousness of colour; that Mr. Eliot, Mr. Kreymborg, 
and Mr. Stevens bring to it a refinement of psychological 



222 CIVILIZATION 

subtlety; Mr. Sandburg, a grim sense of social responsibility; 
Mr. Lindsay, a rhythmic abandon mixed with evangelism; Miss 
Teasdale, a grace. The range here indicated is extraordinary. 
The existence side by side in one generation and in one coun- 
try of such poets as Mr. Masters and Mr. Fletcher, or Mr. 
Eliot and Miss Lowell, is anomalous. Clearly we are past 
that time when a nation will have at a given moment a single 
direct literary current. There is as yet no sign that to any 
one of these groups will fall anything like undivided sway. 
Mr. Frost's " North of Boston " and Mr. Fletcher's " Irradia- 
tions " came out in the same year; " Spoon River Anthology " 
and the first " Imagist Anthology"; Mr. Robinson's *' Lance- 
lot " and Mr. Bodenheim's " Advice." And what gulfs even 
between members of any one of our arbitrary '' classes "! Mr. 
Frost's actualism is seldom far from the dramatic or lyric, 
that of Mr. Masters seldom far from the physiological. Mr. 
Masters is bitter-minded, tediously explanatory, and his pas- 
sionate enquiries fall upon life like so many heavy blows; 
his delvings appear morbid as well as searching. Mr. Frost 
is gentle, whether in irony, humour, or sense of pain: if it is 
the pathos of decay which most moves him, he sees it, none 
the less, at dewfall and moonrise, in a dark tree, a birdsong. 
The inflections of the human voice, as he hears them, are as 
tender as in the hearing of Mr. Masters they are harsh. And 
can Mr. Robinson be thought a commensal of either? His 
again is a prolonged enquiry into the why of human behaviour, 
but how bared of colour, how muffled with reserves and dimmed 
with reticence! Here, indeed, is a step toward romanticism. 
For Mr. Robinson, though a realist in the sense that his pre- 
occupation is with motive, turns down the light in the presence 
of his protagonist that in the gloom he may take on the air 
of something larger and more mysterious than the garishly 
actual. Gleams convey the dimensions — hints suggest a depth. 
We are not always too precisely aware of what is going on in 
this twilight of uncertainties, but Mr. Robinson seems to whis- 
per that the implications are tremendous. Not least, more- 
over, of these implications are the moral — the mirror that Mr. 
Robinson holds up to nature gives us back the true, no doubt, 
but increasingly in his later work (as in " Merlin " and 



J 



POETRY 223 

" Lancelot," particularly the latter) with a slight trick of re- 
fraction that makes of the true the exemplary. 

We cross a chasm, from these sombre psycho-realists, to the 
colourists. To these, one finds, what is human in behaviour or 
motive is of importance only in so far as it affords colour or 
offers possibilities of pattern. Mr, Fletcher is the most bril- 
liant of this group, and the most " uncontrolled ": his colour- 
ism, at its best, is a pure, an astonishingly absolute thing. The 
" human " element he wisely leaves alone — it baffles and es- 
capes him. One is aware that this kaleidoscopic whirl of colour 
is '^ wrung out " of Mr. Fletcher, that it conveys what is for 
him an intense personal drama, but this does not make his 
work " human." The note of " personal drama " is more com- 
plete in the poetry of " H. D.," but this too is, in the last analy- 
sis, a nearly pure colourism, as static and fragmentary, how- 
ever, as Mr. Fletcher's is dynamic. Mr. Bodenheim is more 
detached, cooler, has a more conscious eye for correspondences 
between colour and mood: perhaps we should call him a sym- 
bolist. Even here, however, the " human," the whim of tender- 
ness, the psychological gleam, are swerved so that they may fall 
into a fantastic design. Miss Lowell, finally, more conscious, 
deliberate and energetic than any of these, brilliantly versatile, 
utterly detached, while she " sees " more of the objective world 
(and has farther-ranging interests), sees it more completely 
than any of them simply as raw colour or incipient pattern. 
If the literary pulse is here often feverishly high, the empathic 
and sympathetic temperature is as often absolute zero. 

Mr. Pound shares with Miss Lowell this immersion in the 
" literary " — he is intensely aware of the literary past, rifles it 
for odds and ends of colour, atmosphere, and attitude, is per- 
petually adding bright new bits, from such sources, to his 
Joseph's coat: but if a traditionalist in this, a curio-hunter, 
he is an experimentalist in prosody; he has come far from the 
sentimental literary affectedness of his early work and at his 
best has written lyrics of a singular beauty and transparent 
clarity. The psychological factor has from time to time in- 
trigued him, moreover, and we see him as a kind of link be- 
tween the colourists and such poets as Mr. T. S. Eliot, Mr. 
Alfred Kreymborg, and Mr. Wallace Stevens. These poets 



2 24 CIVILIZATION 

are alike in achieving, by a kind of alchemy, the lyric in terms 
of the analytic: introspection is made to shine, to the subtly 
seen is given a delicate air of false simplicity. Mr. Stevens 
is closest to the colourists. His drift has been away from the 
analytic and towards the mere capture of a " tone." Mr. 
Kreymborg is a melodist and a mathematician. He takes a 
pleasure in making of his poems and plays charming diagrams 
of the emotions. Mr. Eliot has more of an eye for the sharp 
dramatic gesture, more of an ear for the trenchant dramatic 
phrase — he looks now at Laforgue, now at John Webster. His 
technical skill is remarkable, his perception of effect is pre- 
cise, his range narrow, perhaps increasingly narrow. 

Even so rapid and superficial a survey cannot but impress 
us with the essential anarchy of this poetic community. Law- 
lessness has seemed at times to be the prevailing note; no 
poetic principle has remained unchallenged, and we have only 
to look in the less prosperous suburbs and corners of this city 
to see to what lengths the bolder rebels, whether of the 
" Others " group or elsewhere, have gone. Ugliness and shape- 
lessness have had their adherents among those whom aesthetic 
fatigue had rendered momentarily insensitive to the well- 
shaped; the fragmentary has had its adherents among those 
whom cynicism had rendered incapable of any service, too 
prolonged, to one idea. But the fetichists of the ugly and the 
fragmentary have exerted, none the less, a wholesome and 
fructifying influence. Whatever we feel about the ephemeral- 
ity of the specifically ugly or fragmentary, we cannot escape 
a feeling that these, almost as importantly as the new realism 
or the new colourism, have enlarged what we might term the 
general " poetic consciousness " of the time. If there was a 
moment when the vogue of the disordered seemed to threaten, 
or predict, a widespread and rapid poetic decadence, that mo- 
ment is safely past. The tendency is now in the other direc- 
tion, and not the least interesting sign is the fact that many 
of the former apostles of the disordered are to-day experiment- 
ing with the things they yesterday despised — rhyme, metre, 
and the architecture of theme. 

We have our affections, in all this, for the fragmentary and 
ugly as for the abrupt small hideousness — oddly akin to virility 



POETRY 225 

— of gargoyles. We have our affections, too, for the rawest 
of our very raw realisms — for the maddest of our colourisms, 
the most idiosyncratic subtleties of our first introspectionists. 
Do we hesitate a little to ask something more of any of the 
poets whom we thus designate? What we fear is that in 
attempting to give us our something more, they will give us 
something less. What we want more of, what we see our 
contemporary poets as for the most part sadly deficient in, is 
" art." What we are afraid they will lose, if we urge them in 
this direction, is their young sharp brilliance. Urge them, 
however, we must. What our poets need most to learn is 
that poetry is not merely a matter of outpouring, of confession. 
It must be serious: it must be, if simple in appearance, none the 
less highly wrought: it must be packed. It must be beau- 
tifully elaborate rather than elaborately beautiful. It must be 
detached from dogma — we must keep it away from the all too 
prevalent lecture platform. 

What we should like to see, in short, is a fusion, of the ex- 
traordinary range of poetic virtues with which our contempo- 
rary poets confront us, into one poetic consciousness. Do we 
cavil too much in assuming that no one of our poets offers us 
quite enough? Should we rather take comfort in the hope 
that many of their individual " personalities " are vivid enough 
to offset their onesidedness, and in that way to have a consid- 
erable guarantee of survival? We have mentioned that possi- 
bility before, and certainly it cannot be flatly dismissed. But 
I think it cannot be contested that many of these poets already 
feel, themselves, a sharper responsibility, a need for a greater 
comprehensiveness, for a finer and richer tactile equipment, 
a steadier view of what it is that constitutes beauty of form. 
They are immeasurably distant from any dry, cold perfection- 
ism, however; and if we cheer them in taking the path that 
leads thither, it is in the hope of seeing them reach the half- 
way house rather than the summit. For to go all the way is to 
arrive exhausted; to go half way is to arrive with vigour. . . . 
That, however, is to interpose our own view and to lose our 
detachment. We return to a reiteration of our conclusion that 
American poetry is at the moment extraordinarily healthy. Its 
virtues are the virtues of all good poetry, and they are suffi- 



226 CIVILIZATION 

dent to persuade us that the future of English poetry lies as 
much in America as in England. Its faults are the faults of 
a culture that is immature. But again, we reiterate that we 
have here many cultures, and if some are immature, some 
are not. Let those who are too prone to diagnose us culturally 
from " Spoon River Anthology " or " Smoke and Steel " keep 
in mind also Mr. Robinson's " Merlin " and Mr. Frost's 
"North of Boston"; Mr. Fletcher's "Goblins and Pagodas" 
and Miss Lowell's " Can Grande's Castle." 

Conrad Aiken 



ART 

THE problem of American Art is unlike that of any other 
country of the present or the past. We have not here 
the racial and historical foundation on which, until now, every 
art has been built and so our striving (it is far too soon to speak 
of success or failure) must be judged from another standpoint 
than the one to be taken in viewing an art that originates with 
its people or is directly transmitted from an older race. Egypt 
and ancient Mexico furnish examples of the first case, Italy 
and France of the second. When the latter countries were 
colonized by the Greeks, Phoenicians and others, they received 
a culture which could take on fresh vigour when grasped by 
a new race. 

We did not start as a new race, but as Europeans possessing 
the same intellectual heritage as the men who stayed in the 
parent countries. Our problem was not one of receiving the 
ancient tradition from an invading or colonizing people who 
brought with them an art already formed. Ourselves the in- 
vaders and colonizers, our problem was to keep alive the ideas 
that we had had in Europe, or to take over those of our new 
home, or to evolve an art of our own. 

To begin with the second possibility, the question of our 
relation to the ideas of the Indians may obviously be disposed 
of very briefly. The tribes encountered by the early settlers 
were in a state of savagery, and this fact, together with the 
constant warfare between the two races, is a sufficient explana- 
tion why we find no influence from the red men. Even where 
the Europeans encountered culture of a very high order, as in 
Mexico and Peru, the remoteness of the native ideas from those 
of the invading race prevented for centuries a just apprecia- 
tion of the earliest and unquestionably the greatest art pro- 
duced in the Western Hemisphere. It is only in quite recent 
years that we have realized its merit, and it is unlikely that 
even our present-day interest in the exotic arts will bring about 

227 



228 CIVILIZATION 

any important influence from the Indians, although in regions 
such as our Southwest and the parts of Mexico where " Ameri- 
canizing " has not yet killed their art-instinct, they are still 
producing beautiful work. 

We have, of course, retained European ideals, but they have 
been conditioned by circumstances and we have not kept pace 
with Europe or even followed the course of the great art- 
movements until they were almost or quite superseded abroad. 
Our distance from the centres of ancient and modern culture 
on one hand, and the needs of building up the new continent on 
the other, combined to make our people lose interest in art, 
which, indeed, had never found a propitious soil among our 
British forebears. The case of literature is different. The 
love of it is an abiding one with the Anglo-Saxon race, and as 
Shakespeare and the Bible could be read in the frontier cabin 
almost as well as in London or Dublin, there was not the loss 
of knowledge of literature, the break in the production of it 
that we find in the case of the plastic arts. 

It is easy to exaggerate on this score, however, forgetting that 
the art-instinct accumulated in a race for centuries is not to 
be lost by a period of neglect. When he goes to the museum, 
the American recognizes the same masters as does the Euro- 
pean, but the smaller opportunity here to know the classic past 
has the double effect of keeping art-lovers in America in a far 
more reduced minority and at the same time of weakening the 
authority of tradition. 

Not to speak of 17th or i8th century conditions, nor even of 
those of the 19th century, one need only consider the America 
of to-day to realize how little opportunity our people has to 
know art. In all but a few cities, Americans can learn only 
from reproductions and books, though even these are an im- 
measurably safer guide than the bad original works which are 
usually the first to arrive. When one thinks of the European 
countryside and the numberless small towns of all the old coun- 
tries where there is no museum, one may be tempted to ask 
whether art conditions are so very different there. But they 
are different. There will be an old church, or some houses 
of a good period, or some objects in the houses, or — on the 
walls of the inn — some old prints handing on the tradition 



ART 229 

of the great religious pictures (such things were made quite 
commonly until recent times and have not entirely ceased to be 
produced) ; a tradition of construction and of colour makes the 
modern houses fit in quite acceptably with those of the past. 
The centuries have built up a sense of fitness and beauty in 
the making and wearing of costume; there will be some form 
of folk-singing or other collective action of an artistic charac- 
ter, and thus the exceptional individual, born with a strong 
instinct toward art, has surroundings and a foundation that are 
lacking here. A striking proof of the difference between the 
two continents is the effect of the war on art-interest: whereas 
in America public attention has been turned away from art to 
a most marked degree, Europe is producing and buying art 
with a fervour that can only be explained by the desire to get 
back to essentials after the years in which people were de- 
prived of them. 

Another phenomenon to be noted at this point is the dom- 
inance of women in American art-matters. It is unknown in 
any other country. The vast majority of American men are 
engrossed in the drive of work, their leisure goes to sport and 
to the forms of entertainment that call for the smallest amount 
of mental effort. The women, with their quicker sensibility 
and their recognition of art as one of the things that mark the 
higher orders of life, take over the furnishing of the home and 
through this and the study that their greater leisure permits 
them, exert a strong influence on the purchase of art-works 
for private collections and even museums. The production 
of the American painter and sculptor is also much affected as 
a consequence, and in the direction of conventionality. I do 
not claim that the level of art in America would be greatly 
improved at present if it were the men instead of the women 
who took the lead; perhaps, in view of the state of apprecia- 
tion in our people, it would be lowered; but I maintain that 
the fact that art is so much in the hands of women and the 
suspicion among men that it carries with it some implication 
of effeminacy are among the indications of American imma- 
turity in art-appreciation. We cannot expect an art really 
representative of America until there is a foundation of regard 
for his work that the artist can build on. In the old civili- 



230 CIVILIZATION 

zations the artist was meeting an active demand on the part 
of his people; in America, he has to seek desperately for a 
living. Albrecht Diirer summed up the difference between the 
two states of civilization when he wrote from Venice to a friend 
in the young Germany of his day: " Oh, how I shall freeze for 
this sun when I get home; here I am a gentleman, at home a 
parasite." 

It will seem to many that even such famous words should 
not be repeated in a country where art is so often mentioned 
in the papers, where museums are springing up in large num- 
bers, where unheard-of prices are paid for the work of famous 
men, and where even those who take no interest in art will 
accord it a sort of halo. But the very fact that it is relegated 
to the class of Sunday things instead of entering into every- 
day life shows that our colonial period — in the cultural sense 
of the word — is not yet passed. This should not be looked on 
as discouraging; it is natural that the formation of character 
and ideas should require time and I shall endeavour to show 
that the development is really a rapid and healthy one. The 
mistake Americans are most prone to, that of imagining the 
country to have reached a mature character and a valid ex- 
pression, shows their eagerness to advance, and explains their 
readiness to tear down or to build up. 

In the presence of such a spirit, one must see the mistakes 
of conservatism or of ignorance in due perspective. However 
trying to those who suffer from them at the time, they cannot 
fatally warp the growth that is going on. For years we re- 
tained a tariff that obstructed the coming into the country of 
works of art. That is a thing of the past, and as one of the 
reasons used to defend it was that it protected American artists 
against the foreigner, so, with the abolition of the tariff, there 
has been more of a tendency to judge works of art for their 
own qualities, without question of their nationality and with- 
out the puerile idea of nurturing the American product by 
keeping out work from abroad. How far this mistake had 
gone may be judged from the fact that in a certain city of our 
Far West a group of painters made a protest against the atten- 
tion given by a newspaper to an exhibition sent out from New 
York, raising no question of the quality of the work, but merely 



ART 231 

demanding that local men be spoken of when art was discussed 
in the paper — which promptly acquiesced, and removed the 
critic from his position. The case may seem an extreme one, 
yet it illustrates the attitude of many of our collectors and even 
our museum authorities who, in the name of Americanism, 
are " helping to fame many, the sight of whose painting is a 
miseducation," to use a phrase that Mr. Berenson has applied 
to another matter. 

There is no question to-day but that America must evolve 
along the lines of contemporary thought throughout the civ- 
ilized world. There will be a local tang to our art. Certain 
enthusiasms and characteristics, as we develop them, may give 
emphasis to special phases of our production, but there is no 
longer the possibility of an isolated, autochthonic growth, such 
as seemed to be forecast up to about the time of the Revolu- 
tion. The 1 8th century in America with its beautiful archi- 
tecture, its fine craftsmen, and its painting, is only less far from 
the America of to-day than is the art of the Indians. We still 
put up buildings and make furniture in what is called the 
Colonial style, but so do we follow the even more remote 
Mission style of architecture in our Western States, and at- 
tempt to use Indian designs in decoration. The usual fate of 
attempted continuings of a bygone style overtakes all these 
efforts. Our materials are different, our needs are different, 
our time is different. A glance at two houses, as one speeds 
by in an automobile, tells us which is the real Colonial archi- 
tecture, which the imitation. At the Jumel Mansion in New 
York it is easy to see which are the old parts, which the 
restorations, although enough time has passed since the latter 
were made to weather them to the tone of the original 
places. 

In painting, the change that occurred after we became a 
republic is even more unmistakable. The English School un- 
derwent considerable modification when its representatives here 
began to work for themselves. Where Reynolds, Gainsbor- 
ough, and Lawrence were consulting the old masters with such 
studious solicitude, Sir Joshua especially pursuing his enquiry 
into the processes of Titian, men like Copley and Blackburn 
were thrown back on such technical resources as they could 



232 CIVILIZATION 

find here and had to depend for progress on tightening their 
hold on character, Copley has the true note of the primitive 
in the intensity with which he studies his people, and must be 
reckoned with portraitists of almost the highest order. 

What a change in the next generation! The more inde- 
pendent we are politically the more we come out of the isola- 
tion that gave us quiet and freedom to build up the admirable 
style of pre-Revolutionary days. And then there was so much 
to be done in getting our new institutions to work and our new 
land under cultivation, there was so much money to be made 
and so much to import from Europe. It is significant that the 
best painter of the period is John Vanderlyn, who had been 
sent to Paris to study under Ingres. Fine artist that Van- 
derlyn was, and informed by a greater tradition than Copley 
knew, he never reached the impressiveness of the latter. 

I shall not attempt to describe at any length the various 
steps by which we rose from the artistic poverty which was 
ours in the earlier decades of the 19th century. My purpose 
is not to write even a short history of American art, but to 
enquire into its character and accomplishment. The test of 
these is evidently not what each period or school meant to the 
American artists before or after it, but how it compares with 
the rest of the world's art at its time. The thought occurs to 
one forcibly on hearing of the wildly exaggerated esteem — 
whether measured by words or by money — in which the more 
celebrated of American artists are held; one asks oneself how 
the given work would be considered in Europe by competent 
men. Few indeed are the reputations that will stand the test; 
and we do not need to go abroad to apply it, for the galleries 
of our large cities supply ample opportunity for the com- 
parison. 

Beginning with the landscape artists who are the earliest of 
the modern Americans to be looked on as our possible con- 
tribution to art, one's most impersonal observation is that in 
point of time, they, like their successors in this country, follow 
the Europeans of the school to which they belong by some- 
thing like a generation. Now, art-ideas moved very rapidly in 
the 19th century, and — however mechanical an indication it 
may appear at first sight — it is almost a sure condemnation of 



ART 233 

a European painter to find him in one period trying to work 
with the formula of the generation before him. In America 
this test does not apply so well, for we must allow for the 
effect of distance and compare the American with his imme- 
diate contemporaries abroad only in proportion to the advance 
of time — which is to say in proportion to the convenience of 
travel to Europe and the possibility of seeing contemporary 
work here. 

Thus when we consider that Inness, Wyant, and Martin 
were born about a generation after the Barbizon men and very 
nearly at the time of the French Impressionists, we shall not 
say that it was to the latter school that the Americans should 
have belonged. Whereas the European followers of Corot 
and Rousseau were merely retardataires who had not the intel- 
lectual power to seize on the ideas of their own day, the Ameri- 
cans could feel a little of the joy of discoverers through having 
themselves worked out some of the ideas of naturalism in their 
evolution from the earlier landscape painting in this country. 
And so if they add nothing to what the Frenchmen had done 
already — with an incomparably greater tradition to uphold 
them — our trio of nature-lovers expressed genuine sentiment, 
and Homer Martin pushed on to a quality of painting that 
often places him within hailing distance of the classic line 
which, in France, kept out of the swamps of sentimentality 
that engulfed the followers of Wyant and Inness here. 

The cases of Winslow Homer and Albert P. Ryder have an 
interest aside from the actual works of the two painters. They 
are doubtless the strongest Americans of their time — and the 
ones who owe the least to Europe. It must be men of such 
a breed who will make real American art when we are ready 
to produce it. In any case their work must rank among our 
permanently valuable achievements: Homer's for the renewal 
of the sturdy self-reliance that we noted in Copley, Ryder's for 
the really noble design he so often obtained and for the grand 
and moving fidelity to a vision. 

If their independence is so valuable a factor in both men's 
work, there is also to be noted the heavy price that each paid 
for having been reared in a provincial school. With a bold- 
ness of character that recalls Courbet, Winslow Homer fails 



234 CIVILIZATION 

utterly to hold a place in art analogous to that of the French 
realist, because all the power and ability that went into his 
work were unequal to compensating for his lack of the knowl- 
edge of form, of structure, of optical effect that Ingres and 
Delacroix, among others, furnished ready to the hand^ of 
Courbet. Thus Homer's painting goes on throughout his life- 
time quite innocent of any real concern with the central prob- 
lems of European picture-making and owes most of its strength 
to the second-rate quality of illustration. One hesitates to say 
that Ryder would have gone farther had he been born in 
France, yet the fact of his labouring for ten or fifteen years on 
many a small canvas, the very limited number of his works 
which has resulted from the difficulty he had in saying the 
thing that was in him, are marks of a bad training. His range 
is not a wide one, but the deep beauty he infused into his pic- 
tures is one of our chief reasons for confidence in the art- 
instinct that lies dormant in our people. 

None of the men in the next group we must consider, the 
artists who enter fully into European painting, have the foun- 
dation of talent that Ryder had. Whistler is, of course, the 
painter to whom most Americans pin their faith in searching 
among their compatriots for an essential figure in 19th-century 
art. But take the first opportunity to see him with the great 
Frenchmen of his time: beside Degas his drawing is of a sickly 
weakness but slightly relieved by his sense of rhythm in line 
and form; beside Manet his colour and painting seem even 
more etiolated, and to save one's feeling for him from utter 
demolition one hastens to the usual American refuge of the 
sentiment and — in the etchings — to the Yankee excellence of 
the craftsmanship. The nocturnes really do have a felicity in 
their rendering of the poetry of the night that would make us 
regret their loss, and when the unhappy Whistlerian school 
has been forgotten (an artist must take some responsibility for 
his followers) we shall have more satisfaction in the butterfly 
that Whistler knew himself to be, since he adopted it as his 
signature. It is merit of no such slightness that we love in 
Ryder, and yet when we reach Chase and Sargent we find even 
less of basic talent, for which their immersion in the current 
of European painting could have furnished a finely tempered 



ART 235 

instrument of expression. Both men show the natural bent 
for painting that is often a valuable asset and often — as in 
their case — a source of danger. They do not enrich our annals 
by any great works, but they do the country an immense serv- 
ice when they cause its students and collectors to take one of 
the final steps in the direction of the live tradition of Europe. 
They never appreciated what was greatest among their con- 
temporaries, and failing to have this grasp of the creative im- 
pulse and of the new principles that were at work in Paris, 
they offered clever manipulations of the material as a substi- 
tute. Feeling the insufficience of this, Sargent has tried the 
grave style of the early Italians in his decorations at the Public 
Library in Boston. But his Biblical personages get him no 
nearer to the essentials of art than the society people of whom 
he has done so many likenesses. In Boston, it is Chavannes 
who shows which is the great tradition of the period and how 
it accords with the classic past. Sargent is perhaps most 
American in his unreadiness to perceive the immense things 
that Europe, modern and ancient, had to offer him. 

Even so, with Chase and Sargent we find ourselves far 
nearer the period when American artists shall partake in art- 
ideas during their moment of full fertility. Our Impressionists 
are only a decade or two behind the Frenchman, and while one 
must not slip into a too easy trick of rating talent by the time 
of its appearance, one cannot fail to be struck by the fact that 
John H. Twachtman and J. Alden Weir approached the qual- 
ity of their French preceptors with far greater closeness than 
that with which the Inness-Wyant group followed the Bar- 
bizon men. Much as there is of charm and sound pictorial 
knowledge in Twachtman's work and Weir's, one feels that 
they are not yet deep enough in the great tradition to go 
on to an art of their own creation, and we have to content 
ourselves with giving them a place among the Impressionists of 
secondary rank. 

An interesting case among the Americans who made the seri- 
ous study of European art that began soon after the middle 
of the 19th century, is that of John La Farge. We know the 
history of his seeking, his copying, his associations, specula- 
tions, and travels. All his life he is the man from the new 



236 CIVILIZATION 

country asking the dead and the living representatives of the 
classic tradition for help. How little we see of the man him- 
self in the mosaic of charming things that make up his art. 
Winslow Homer exists as a personality, ill-educated and crude, 
but affirmative and arresting. La Farge disappears in the 
smoke of the incense that he burns before the various shrines 
to which his eclecticism led him. 

If not to be admired as a great artist, he was a man of great 
gifts and a genuine appreciator of the masters. Therefore, he 
is not to be confused for a moment with the ignoble pasticheurs 
who achieve office and honours in the ansemic institutions with 
which we imitate the academies and salons of Europe. These 
are among the youthful errors I mentioned on an earlier page 
— depressing enough when one sees the acres of " decorative " 
abominations which fill our state-houses, courts, and libraries, 
but in reality of no great importance as a detriment to our 
culture. Like the soldiers' monuments, the dead architecture, 
the tasteless manufactured articles of common use, they sink 
so far below any level of art that the public is scarcely affected 
by them. Only the persons trained in schools to admire the 
painting of a Mr. E. H. Blashfield or the sculpture of a Mr. 
Daniel C. French ever try to think of them as beautiful; the 
rest of the public takes them on faith as something that goes 
with the building, like the " frescoed " cupids to be found in 
the halls of apartment houses or the tin cupolas and minarets 
on the roof. The popular magazine-illustrators, poor as they 
are, have more power to mislead than our quasi-official nonen- 
tities. 

Between the pseudo-classic decorators and the frankly " low-* 
brow " artists of the commercial publications, the posters, and 
the advertisements, there is the large class of men whose work 
is seen at the annual exhibitions, the dealers' galleries, and the 
American sections of the museums. They partake of the vice 
of each of the other two classes: the easily learned formula for 
their product being a more or less thorough schooling in some 
style derived from the past, plus an optimistic or " red- 
blooded " or else gently melancholy attitude toward the sub- 
ject. Velasquez has been the main victim of their caricature 
in the later years, but a little Chinese, Florentine, Impression- 



ART 237 

ist, or even Cubist style will often be added to give a look of 
" modernity " to the work. As long as there is a recognizable 
proficiency in drawing and painting (it is of course only for the 
cheaper trade that the picture has to be guaranteed as done by 
hand), the erudite patron or museum trustee is assured of the 
seriousness of the artist's intentions, while to make the thing 
take with the general buyer, the most important matter is 
judgment as to the type of American girl, the virile male, or 
the romantic or homely landscape that our public likes to live 
with. 

The only excuse for mentioning such things in an essay on 
American art is that they help to define it by contrast — for 
these pictures are neither art nor American. The disease of 
which they are an outward sign infects Europe almost as much 
as it does our own country, and there is hardly a distinguish- 
ing mark to tell whether the Salon picture was done in Madrid, 
Berlin, or Indianapolis. A sentence from an eminent Ameri- 
can critic, Russell Sturgis, gives the key to the situation. He 
said, " The power of abstract design is lost to the modern 
world, — we must paint pictures or carve expressional groups 
when we wish to adorn." In the half generation that has 
passed since these words were spoken, the French have proven 
by several arts based entirely on abstract design that the powet 
for it was not lost to the world and that men still know the 
difference between expression by form and colour and expres- 
sion by concrete ideas. 

Throughout this survey I have taken painting as the index 
to the art-instinct of America, and as we glance again at even 
our best painters we see that it is on concrete ideas that they 
have built: on character in portraiture with Copley, on ro-- 
mantic vision with Ryder, on observation of appearances with 
Homer. Precisely the reason for Whistler's great success 
among his countrymen was the promise of release he afforded 
by his reaching out for the design and colour of the Orient, 
with which one associates also his spoken words, offering us 
" harmonies " and " symphonies " in place of the art built on 
intellectual elements that we had had before. The fact that 
Whistler himself was not strong enough in his grasp of tradi- 
tion, or of a nature to achieve an important result along the 



238 CIVILIZATION 

lines he pointed to, does not change the issue. We had begun 
to be aware of the repression of instinct that was marking 
American hfe. We had recognized that the satisfaction of the 
senses, quite as much as intellectual pleasure, is to be de- 
manded of art. Puritan morality and Quaker drabness had 
turned us away from any such conception, and when they took 
notice of art at all, it was for its educational value, either to 
inculcate religious or patriotic ideas, or for its connection with 
the classic past. 

Add to this the utilitarian needs of a country that had to 
build rapidly, caring for cheapness more than for permanence 
(so little of the building, in fact, was intended to be perma- 
nent), and one has an explanation of the absence of architec- 
tural quality in the American houses of the last hundred years. 
The characteristic of building in the time is seen in the lifeless 
blocks of " brownstone fronts," in the apartments that have so 
little of the home about them that in the restlessness of his 
search for a place to live satisfactorily, the American of the 
cities has earned the name of the " van-dweller," — one sees the 
thing again in the abject monotony of farm-houses and coun- 
try residences. Their spirit, or lack of it, is continued in fur- 
niture and decoration. One understands why Europe has been 
the magic word for countless thousands of Americans. Per- 
haps it was the palaces and museums that they set out to see 
and that they told about on their return, but more impressive 
to them — because more satisfying to their hunger for a beauty 
near to their daily lives — was the sight of an Italian village 
built with love for hillsides and with understanding of the forms 
of the hill and of the t3rpe of construction that would suit it. 
Or was it the cheeriness of the solid Dutch houses whose clear 
reds and blacks look out so robustly through the green of the 
trees that border the canals? The bright-coloured cloth- 
ing of the peasants became delightful to the traveller, even if 
he still gave it a pitying smile when he saw it again on the 
immigrant here ; and the humble foreigner, anxious to fit in to 
his new surroundings, hastened to tone down the vivacity of his 
native costume to the colourlessness of the American farmer's 
or workman's garb. In place of the gay pink or green stucco 
of his cottage at home, the immigrant got more or less of 



ART 239 

sanitary plumbing, higher wages, and other material benefits, 
to recompense him for the life he had left behind. 

The life! That was the magic that Europe held for our 
visitors. They might return to the big enterprises, the big 
problems here, and feel that America was home because they 
had a share in its growth, but their nostalgia for the old coun- 
tries continued to grow in the measure that they came to ap- 
preciate the wisdom with which life was ordered there — as 
they realized how the stable institutions, the old religions, festi- 
vals,, traditions, all the things that flower into art, had resisted 
the terrific change that the industrial revolution had brought 
into the 19th century. Behind all questions of the coming of 
objects of art into this country or the appearance of new artists 
or new schools here, lies this most pivotal matter of the ele- 
ments of art in American life. They need not be, they cannot 
be the same as those in European life, but it is futile to think 
of having an art here if we deny ourselves the ideas and feel- 
ings of which art has been made — the joy and awe of life 
that the Greek responded to in his marbles, the Italian in his 
frescoes, the Spaniard, the Fleming, the Dutchman, and the 
Frenchman in his canvases. Copying the externals of their 
work without again living their lives can result only in academ- 
ism — bad sculpture and bad pictures. 

It was not as a protest against bad art, local or foreign, 
that the International Exhibition of 19 13 was organized, and 
it is very solidly to the credit of our public that it did not re- 
gard the event in that negative fashion — but as a positive thing, 
a revelation of the later schools of European painting of which 
it had been kept in ignorance by the will of the academies here 
and abroad. The " Armory Show," as it was called, drew 
forth a storm of ridicule, but it also attracted such hundreds of 
thousands of visitors as no current exhibition had ever gath- 
ered in this country before. The first contact of our public 
with the arts that have succeeded Impressionism — with the 
painting of Cezanne, Redon, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse, the 
Cubists, and others — was made at this epoch-marking show. 
With the jeers that it received there were not a few hosannas, 
and even the vast majority of visitors — doubtful as to the exact 
value of the various exhibits, knew that qualities existed in 



240 CIVILIZATION 

the new schools that had never been seen here and that were 
needed. Some three hundred works went from the walls of 
the Armory to form a vanguard for the far more important 
purchases of modern art that have since been building up our 
collections; so that at the moment of this writing an exhibition 
can be opened at the Metropolitan Museum which, while rep- 
resenting a mere fraction of the wealth of such pictures in 
American possession, gives a superb idea of the great schools 
of the later 19th century and the 20th century in France. It 
is worthy of note that in its response to the great show of 19 13 
and to the smaller ones that followed, America was only giving, 
in a stronger form, the measure of a power of appreciation it 
had shown before. Earlier examples of this are to be found 
in the great collections of Barbizon and Impressionist pictures 
here. A thing that should weigh against many a discouraging 
feature of our art-conditions is the fact that an American 
museum was the first in the world, and the only one during 
the lifetime of Manet, to hang works by that master. 

Returning now to our own painting, one man in this country 
resisted with complete success the test of an exhibition with 
the greatest of recent painters from abroad. It was Mr. 
Maurice B. Prendergast, who for thirty years had been joy- 
ously labouring at an art which showed its derivation from 
the best French painting of his day, its admirable acceptances 
of the teaching of Cezanne (scarcely a name even in Europe 
when Mr. Prendergast first studied him), and its humorous 
and affectionate appreciation of the American scenes that the 
artist had known from his youth. In original and logical 
design, in brilliant colour that yet had the mellowness of a 
splendid wine, he expresses the modern faith in the world we 
see and makes it lovable. At last we welcome an art in accord 
with the finest of the ancient-modern tradition, as European 
critics have since declared; yet it remains American in prove- 
nance and in the air of unconscious honesty that has always 
been a characteristic of the good work of this country. 

The latest wave of influence to come over American art 
has almost been the most far-reaching and invigorating. To 
go further than this assertion, at least in the matter of indi- 
viduals, would be to forego the support of too large a part 



ART 241 

of that body of opinion that I know to be behind my state- 
ments throughout this essay. Art-matters must, in the final 
analysis, be stated dogmatically, but I am unwilling to speak 
of the schools now developing save in a general way, especially 
as the most interesting men in them have still to reach a defini- 
tive point in their evolution. They are abreast or nearly 
abreast of the ideas of Europe, and there is an admirable vigour 
in the work that some individuals are producing with those 
ideas. But the changes brought about by the International 
are still too recent for us to expect the most important results 
from them for a number of years. The general condition here 
has probably never been as good before. 

I have, till now, spoken only of the more traditional aspects 
of art — the kind one finds in museums — and that last word 
calls for at least a mention of the great wealth of art-objects 
that are heaping up in our public collections, and in the private 
galleries which so often come to the aid of the museums. 

There is, however, another phase of our subject that de- 
mands comment, if only as a point of departure for the study 
that will one day be given to the American art that is not yet 
recognized by its public or its makers as one of our main ex- 
pressions. The steel bridges, the steel buildings, the newly 
designed machines, and utensils of all kinds we are bringing 
forth show an adaptation to function that is recognized as one 
of the great elements of art. Perhaps the process has not yet 
gone far enough for us to look on these things as fully devel- 
oped works of art, perhaps we shall still need some influence 
from Europe to make us see the possibilities we have here, or 
again, it may be in America that the impetus to creation along 
such lines will be the stronger. At all events we may feel sure 
that the study of the classics, ancient and modern, which is 
spreading throughout the country has, in some men, reached 
a point of saturation which permits the going on to new dis- 
covery, and we may be confident of the ability of our artists to 
make good use of their advantage. 

Walter Pach 



THE THEATRE 

OF the perceptible gradual improvement in the American 
popular taste so far as the arts are concerned, the theatre 
as we currently engage it offers, comparatively, the least evi- 
dence. The best-selling E. Phillips Oppenheims, Robert W. 
Chamberses, and Eleanor H. Porters of yesterday have given 
considerable ground to Wharton and Bennett, to Hergesheimer 
and Wells. The audiences in support of Stokowski, the Flon- 
zaley Quartette, the Philharmonic, the great piano and violin 
virtuosos, and the recognized singers, are yearly augmented. 
Fine painting and fine sculpture find an increasing sober ap- 
preciation. The circulation of Munsey's Magazine falls, and 
that of the Atlantic Monthly rises. But the best play of an 
American theatrical season, say a " Beyond the Horizon," has 
still to struggle for full breath, while across the street the re- 
ceipts of some " Ladies' Night," " Gold Diggers," or " Bat," 
running on without end, mount to the half-million mark. 

If one speaks of the New York theatre as the American 
theatre, one speaks with an exaggerated degree of critical char- 
ity, for the New York theatre — so far as there is any taste in 
the American theatre — is the native theatre at its fullest flower. 
Persons insufficiently acquainted with the theatre have a fond- 
ness for controverting this, but the bookkeeping departments 
offer concrete testimony that, if good drama is supported at 
all, it is supported in the metropolitan theatre, not in the 
so-called " road " theatre. The New York theatre supports 
an American playwright like Booth Tarkington when he does 
his best in " Clarence," where the road theatre supports him 
only when he does his worst, as in " Mister Antonio." The 
New York theatre, these same financial records prove, sup- 
ports Shaw, O'Neill, Galsworthy, Bahr, and others of their 
kind, at least in sufficient degree to permit them to pay their 
way, where the theatre of Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, 
Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh spells failure 

243 



244 CIVILIZATION 

for them. Save it be played by an actor or actress of great 
popular favour, a first-rate piece of dramatic writing has to-day 
hardly a chance for success outside of New York. These other 
cities of America, though they are gradually reading better 
jDooks and patronizing better music and finer musicians, are 
almost drama-deaf. " There is, in New York," the experienced 
Mr. William A. Brady has said to me, " an audience of at least 
fifteen thousand for any really good play. That isn't a large 
audience; it won't turn the play into a profitable theatrical 
venture; but it is a damned sight larger audience than you'll 
be able to find in any other American city." Let the native 
sons of the cities thus cruelly maligned, before they emit their 
habitual bellows of protest, consider, once they fared forth 
from New York, the fate of nine-tenths of the first-rate plays 
produced in the American theatre without the hocus-pocus of 
fancy box-office " stars " during the last ten years. 

The theatrical taste of America at the present time, outside 
of the metropolis, is demonstrated by the box-office returns 
to be one that venerates the wall-motto opera of Mr, William 
Hodge and the spectacular imbecilities of Mr. Richard Walton 
Tully above the finest work of the best of its native dramatists 
like O'Neill, and above the finest work of the best of the mod- 
ern Europeans. In the metropolis, an O'Neill's " Beyond the 
Horizon," a Galsworthy's " Justice," a Shaw's " Androcles," 
at least can live; sometimes, indeed, live and prosper. But 
for one respectable piece of dramatic writing that succeeds out- 
side of New York, there are twenty that fail miserably. The 
theatrical culture of the American countryside is in the main 
of a piece with that of the French countryside^ and to the na- 
ture of the latter the statistics of the French provincial theatres 
offer a brilliant and dismaying attestation. Save a good play 
first obtain the endorsement of New York, it is to-day impos- 
sible to get a paying audience for it in any American city of size 
after the first curiosity-provoking performance. These audi- 
ences buy, not good drama, but notoriety. Were all commu- 
nication with the city of New York suddenly to be cut off for 
six months, the only theatrical ventures that could earn their 
way outside would be the Ziegfeld " Follies," the Winter Gar- 
den shows, " Ben Hur," and the hack dramatizations of the 



THE THEATRE 245 

trashier best-sellers like " Pollyanna " and " Daddy Longlegs." 
This is not postured for sensational effect. It is literally true. 
So true, in fact, that there is to-day not a single producer in 
the American theatre who can afford to, or who will, risk the 
loss of a mere four weeks' preliminary " road " trial of a first- 
class play. If he cannot get a New York theatre for his pro- 
duction, he places it in the storehouse temporarily until he 
can obtain a metropolitan booking rather than hazard the finan- 
cial loss that, nine times in ten, is certain to come to him. 

More and more, the better producing managers — men like 
Hopkins, William Harris, Jr., Ames, et al. — are coming to open 
their plays in New York " cold," that is, without the former 
experimental performances in thitherward cities. And more 
and more, they are coming to realize to their sorrow that, un- 
less New York supports these plays of the better sort, they can 
look for no support elsewhere. Chicago, boasting of its hos- 
pitality to sound artistic endeavour, spent thirty-five hundred 
dollars on a drama by Eugene O'Neill in the same week that it 
spent forty-five thousand dollars on Al Jolson's Winter Gar- 
den show. Boston, one of the first cities to rush frantically 
forward with proofs of its old New England culture, has turned 
into a prompt and disastrous failure every first-rate play pre- 
sented in its theatres without a widely advertised star actor 
during the last five years, and at the same time has made a 
fortune for the astute Mr. A. H. Woods, who, gauging its cul- 
ture accurately, has sent it " Up in Mabel's Room," " Getting 
Gertie's Garter," and similar spicy boudoir and hay-mow 
farces, together with Miss Theda Bara in " The Blue Flame." 
(It is no secret among the theatrical managers that the only 
way to bring the culture of Boston to the box-office window is 
through a campaign of raw advertising: the rawer the better. 
Thus the Boston Sunday newspaper advertisements of " Up in 
Mabel's Room " were made to display a girl lying on a bed, 
with the suggestive catch-lines, " 10,000 Visitors Weekly " and 
" Such a Funny Feeling." Thus, the advertisements of an- 
other exhibit presented a rear view of a nude female with the 
title of the show, " Oh, Mommer," printed across the ample 
buttocks. Thus, the advertisements of a Winter Garden music 
show, alluding to the runway used in these exhibitions, chris- 



246 CIVILIZATION 

tened it " The Bridge of Thighs.") No play presented in 
Philadelphia since " The Girl with the Whooping Cough " 
(subsequently suppressed by the New York police authorities 
on the ground of indecency) has been patronized to the extent 
where it has been found necessary to call out the police re- 
serves to maintain order, as was the case when the play in point 
was produced. Washington is a cultural wilderness; I have 
personally attended the premieres of ten highly meritorious 
dramas in the national capital in the last six years and can 
report accurately on the quality of the receptions accorded to 
them. Washington would seem still to be what it was some 
fifteen years or so ago when, upon the initial revelation of 
Barrie's " Peter Pan," it essayed to boo it into permanent dis- 
card. Baltimore, Detroit (save during the height of the war 
prosperity when the poor bohicks, wops, and Greeks in the 
automobile works found themselves suddenly able to buy the- 
atre seats regularly), Cleveland, St. Louis, San Francisco — 
the story is the same. Honourable drama spells ruin; legs, 
lewdness and sentimentality spell riches. 

In comparison with the taste of the great American cultural 
prairie whereon these cities are situated, the city of New 
York, as I have written, looms up an aesthetic Athens. In 
New York, too, there is prosperity for bare knees, bed hu- 
mours, and " Peg o' My Heart " bathos, but not alone for 
these. Side by side with the audiences that crowd into the 
leg shows, the couch farces, and the uplift sermons are audi- 
ences of considerable bulk that make profitable the production 
of such more estimable things as Shaw's " Heartbreak House," 
O'Neill's " Emperor Jones," the plays of St. John Ervine and 
Dunsany, of Tolstoy and Hauptmann, of Bahr and Benavente 
and Guitry. True enough, in order to get to the theatres in 
which certain of these plays are revealed, one is compelled to 
travel in a taxicab several miles from Broadway — and at times 
has to sit with the chauffeur in order to pilot him to far streets 
and alleyways that are not within his sophisticated ken — 
but, once one gets to the theatres, one finds them full, and 
their audiences enthusiastic and responsive. The culture of 
the American theatre — in so far as it exists — may be said, in 
fact, to be an alleyway culture. Almost without exception in 



THE THEATRE 247 

the last dozen years and more have the best dramatists of 
Europe and of our own country been driven up alleyways and 
side-streets for their first American hearing. Up these dark 
alleys and in these remote malls alone have they been able to 
find a sufficient intelligence for their wares. Hervieu, Shaw, 
Echegaray, Strindberg, Bjornson, Dunsany, Masefield, Ervine, 
Bergstrom, Chekhov, Andreyev, Benavente, O'Neill — 'hese 
and many others of eminence owe their New York introduc- 
tion to the side-street American who, in the majority of cases, 
is found upon analysis to be of fifty per cent, foreign blood. 
And what thus holds true of New York holds equally true in 
most of the other cities. In most of such cities, that is, as have 
arrived at a degree of theatrical polish sufficient to boast a little 
playhouse up an ulterior mews. 

The more general American theatrical taste, reflected per- 
haps most fairly in such things as the idiotic endorsements of 
the Drama League and the various " white lists " of the dif- 
ferent religious organizations, is — for all the undeniable fact 
that it seems gradually to be improving — still in the playing- 
blocks and tin choo-choo-car stage. Satire, unless it be of the 
most obvious sort and approach easily assimilable burlesque, 
spells failure for a producer. A point of view that does not 
effect a compromise with sentimentality spells failure for a 
dramatist. Sex, save it be presented in terms of a seltzer- 
siphon, " Abendstern," or the Police Gazette, spells failure for 
both. The leaders in the propagation of this low taste are not 
the American managers and producers, as is commonly main- 
tained, but the American playwrights. During the seventeen 
years of my active critical interest in the theatre, I have not 
encountered a single honest piece of dramatic writing from an 
American hand that could not get a hearing — and an intelligent 
hearing — from one or another of these regularly abused man- 
agers and producers. And during these years I have, by virtue 
of my joint professional duties as critic and co-editor of a sym- 
pathetic literary periodical, read perhaps nine-tenths of the 
dramatic manuscripts which aspiring young America has con- 
fected. This young America, loud in its inveighing against the 
managers and producers, has in the space of time indicated 
produced very, very little that was worth producing, and that 



248 CIVILIZATION 

little has promptly found a market. A bad workman is al- 
ways indignant. But I know of no good American play that 
either has not already been produced, or has not been bought 
for future production. Any good play by an American will 
find its producer readily enough. The first manager who read 
" Beyond the Horizon " bought it immediately he laid the 
manuscript down, and this, recall, was its professionally un- 
known author's first three-act play. The American theatre 
has altered in this department; the last fifteen years have 
wrought a tonic change. 

No, the fault is not with the managers and producers, but 
with the playwrights. The latter, where they are not mere 
parrots," are cowards. Young and old, new and experienced, 
talented and talentless alike, they are in the mass so many 
Saturday Evening Post souls, alone dreaming of and intent 
upon achieving a sufficient financial gain to transmute the Ford 
into a Rolls-Royce and the Hudson Bay seal collar into Rus- 
sian sable. A baby cannot be nourished and developed physi- 
cally upon water; a theatrical public, for all its potential will- 
ingness, cannot be developed aesthetically upon a diet of snide 
writing. In the American theatre of the present time there 
are not more than two, or at most three, playwrights out 
of all the hundreds, who retain in their hearts a determined 
and uncorrupted purpose. Take away young O'Neill, and 
give a bit of ground to Miss Rita Wellman (whose accomplish- 
ment is still too vague for fixed appraisal), and there is next 
to nothing left. Flashes of talent, yes, but only flashes. 
Craven's " Too Many Cooks " and " The First Year " are 
observant, highly skilful depictions of the American scene, but 
they are dramatic literature only in the degree that " Main 
Street " and " This Side of Paradise " are literature. With 
the extraordinary " Papa," Miss Zoe Akins gave up and sur- 
rendered — at least temporarily — to the box-office skull and 
cross-bones. Until Tarkington proves that " Clarence " was 
not a happy accident in the long and unbroken line of " Up 
from Nowhere," " Mister Antonio," " The Country Cousin," 
" The Man from Home," " Cameo Kirby," " Your Humble 
Servant," "Springtime," "Getting a Polish," "The Gibson 
Upright," and " Poldekin," we shall have to hold up our deci- 



THE THEATRE • 249 

sion on him. George Ade, the great promise of authentic 
American drama, is no more; he pulled in his oars, alas, in 
mid-stream, Joseph Medill Patterson, an honest dramatist, 
fell through the bridge while not yet half way across. The 
rest? Well, the rest are the Augustus Thomases, left-overs 
from the last generation, proficient technicians with empty 
heads, or youngsters still dramatically wet behind the ears. 
The rest of the rest? Ticket salesmen. 

In no civilized country in the world to-day is there among 
playwrights so little fervour for sound drama as in the United 
States. In England, they at least try, in a measure, to write 
well; in Germany, to experiment bravely in new forms; in 
France^ to philosophize either seriously or lightly upon life 
as they find it; in Russia, to treat soberly of problems physi- 
cal and spiritual; in Spain, to depict the Spanish heart and 
conscience and atmosphere; in Ireland, to reflect the life and 
thoughts, the humour and tragedy and encompassing aspira- 
tions, of a people. And in the United States — what? In the 
United States, with hardly more than two exceptions, there is 
at the moment not a playwright who isn't thinking of " suc- 
cess " above honest work. Good and bad craftsmen alike, 
they all think the same. Gold, silver, copper. And the re; 
suit is an endless procession of revamped crook plays, detective 
plays, Cinderella plays, boudoir plays, bucolic plays: fodder 
for doodles. The cowardice before the golden snake's eye 
spreads to the highest as well as to the lowest. Integrity is 
thrown overboard as the ship is steered unswervingly into the 
Golden Gate. The unquestionable talent of an Avery Hop- 
wood — a George M. Cohan — a George Bronson-Howard — is 
deliberately self-corrupted. 

The American professional theatre is to-day at once the rich- 
est theatre in the world, and the poorest. Financially, it 
reaches to the stars; culturally, with exception so small as to 
be negligible, it reaches to the drains. For both of these 
reaches, the American newspaper stands largely responsible. 
The American newspaper, in general, regards the theatre with 
contempt. My early years, upon leaving the university, were 
spent on the staff of one of them — the leading daily journal 
of America, it was in those days— and I shall never forget its 



2 50 CIVILIZATION 

attitude toward the theatre: cheap, hollow, debased. If a 
play was produced by a manager who advertised extensively 
in the paper, it was praised out of all reason. If a play was 
produced by a manager who happened to be persona non grata 
in the office, it was dismissed with a brief reportorial notice. 
If a play was produced by a new and enterprising manager 
on the night of another production in a theatre patronized by 
fashionable audiences — the Empire, say — the former play, 
however worthy an effort it might be, was let down with a stick 
or two that there might be room to print the names of the 
fashionables who were in the Empire seats. The surface of 
things has changed somewhat since then, but the situation at 
bottom is much the same. A talented young reviewer writes 
honestly of a tawdry play in the Evening Sun; the producer 
of the play, an office favourite, complains; and the young re- 
viewer is promptly discharged. A moving picture producer 
takes half-page advertisements of his forthcoming opus in the 
New York newspapers, and the screen exhibit, a piece of trash, 
is hailed as a master work. Let a new drama by Gerhart 
Hauptmann be presented in the Park Theatre to-night and 
let Mr. John Barrymore also appear at eight-thirty in a play 
by some obscure hack at the Empire, and there will not be a 
single newspaper in the whole of New York City that will not 
review the latter flashy affair at the expense of the former. 

It is not that the newspapers, in New York as elsewhere, are 
dishonest — few of them are actually dishonest; it is that they 
are suburban, shoddy, cheap. With only four exceptions that 
I can think of, the American newspaper, wherever you find it, 
treats the theatre as if it were of very much less importance 
than baseball and of but a shade more importance than a rape 
in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Two columns are given freely 
to the latest development in bootlegging in Harlem, and a be- 
grudged half-column to a play by John Galsworthy. A society 
woman is accused by her husband of having been guilty of 
adultery with a half-breed Indian, and the allotment is four 
columns. On the same day, a Shakespearean production is 
mounted by the most artistic producer in the American theatre, 
and the allotment of space is two-thirds of a column. The 
reply of the newspapers is, " Well, we give the public what it 



THE THEATRE 251 

wants! And it is more greatly interested in scandal than in 
Shakespeare." Have not then the theatrical managers the 
right to reply in the same terms? And when they do_, some of 
them, disgustedly reply in the same terms, what is the h}^©- 
critical appraisal of their offerings that the selfsame newspapers 
vouchsafe to them? If the New York Times devotes three 
columns to a dirty divorce case, I fail to see how it can with 
justice or reason permit its theatrical reviewer indignantly to 
denounce Mr. A. H. Woods in the same issue for devoting 
three hours to a dirty farce. 

The American drama, like the American audience, lacks re- 
pose. This is ever logically true of a new civiHzation. Time 
must mellow the mind and heart before drama may achieve 
depth and richness; time must mellow the mind and heart be- 
fore an audience may achieve the mood of calm deliberation. 
Youth is a rare and precious attribute, but youth, for all its 
fine courage and derring-do, is inclined to be superficial. Its 
emotions and its reactions are respectively of and to the pri- 
mary colours; the pastels it is impatient of. The American 
theatre, drama, and audience are the theatre, drama, and audi- 
ence of the metaphysical and emotional primary colours: sub- 
stantial, vivid, but all too obvious and glaring. I speak, of 
course, generally. For there are a few notable exceptions to 
the rule, and these exceptions portend in the American theatre 
the first signs of the coming dawn. A producer like Arthur 
Hopkins, perhaps the first American man of the theatre gifted 
with a genuine passion for fine and beautiful things and the 
talent with which to do — or at least try to do — them; a drama- 
tist like young O'Neill, permitting no compromise or equivoke 
in the upward sweep of his dynamic imagination; an actor 
like Arnold Daly and an actress like Margaret Anglin to 
whom failure in the service of honest drama means absolutely 
nothing — these are they who inspire our faith in the future. 
Nor do they stand alone. Hume and Moeller, Jones, Peters, 
Simonson and Bel-Geddes, Glaspell, Wellman and Pottle — 
such youngsters, too, are dreaming their dreams, some of them, 
true enough, still silly dreams, but yet dreams. And the 
dreaming spreads, spreads. . . . 

But in its slow and brave ascent, the American theatre is 



2 52 CIVILIZATION 

still heavily retarded by the insular forces that, as in no other 
theatre save the English, operate in the Republic. The fight 
against outworn convention is a brave and bitter fight, but 
victory still rests mainly on the banners of the Philistines. 
The drama that dismisses sentimentality for truth, that seeks 
to face squarely the tragedy and comedy of love and life, 
that declines to pigeon-hole itself, and that hazards to view 
the American scene with cosmopolitan eyes, is confronted at 
every turn by the native Puritanism (as often shammed as 
inborn), and by the native parochialism and hypocrisy. The 
production that derides all stereotype — all the ridiculous and 
mossy rubber-stamps — is in turn derided. The actor or 
actress who essays to filter a role through the mind of a human 
being instead of through the mind of a rouged marionette is 
made mock of. Here, the playgoing public finds its leaders 
in three-fourths of the newspaper reviewing chairs, chairs in- 
fluenced, directly or indirectly, by an intrinsic inexperience 
and ignorance, or by an extrinsic suggestion of " policy." 

The American theatre and drama have long suffered from 
being slaves to the national hypocrisy. Only on rare occasions 
have they been successful in casting off the shackles, and then 
but momentarily. The pull against them is stubborn, strong. 
Cracking the black snake across their backs are a hundred 
padrones: newspapers trembling at the thought of offending 
their advertisers, religious orders poking their noses into what 
should not concern them, corrupt moral uplift organizations 
and lecherous anti-vice societies itching for the gauds of pub- 
licity, meddling college professors augmenting their humble 
wage by writing twenty-dollar articles on subjects they know 
nothing about for the Sunday supplements, ex-real estate re- 
porters and divorcee interviewers become " dramatic critics," 
notoriety seeking clergymen, snide producers trying to protect 
their snide enterprises from the dangers of the invasion of 
truth and beauty. Let a group of drama-loving and theatre- 
loving young men, resourceful, skilful, and successful, come 
upon the scene, as the Washington Square Players came, let 
them bring flashes of authentic dramatic art into their native 
theatre, and against them is promptly hurled the jealous irony 
of the Old Guard that is dead, but never surrenders. Let 



THE THEATRE 253 

a young playwright like Zoe Akins write an admirable fan- 
tastic comedy (" Papa "), and against her are brought all the 
weapons of the morals-in-art mountebanks. Let a producer 
like Hopkins break away from the mantel-leaning histrionism 
and palm-pot investiture, and against him is brought up the 
curt dismissal of freakishness. 

The native theatre, for all the fact that it is on the way, 
is not yet ready for such things as demand a degree of civiliza- 
tion for receptive and remunerative appreciation. The " Pegs 
o' My Heart " and " Pollyannas," the " Turn to the Rights " 
and " Lightnin's " still make millions, while the bulk of finer 
things languish and perish. I speak, remember, not of the 
theatre of one city, but of the theatre of the land. This the- 
atre, considering it in so far as possible as a unit, is still not 
much above the Midway Plaisance, the honk-a-tonk, the Sun- 
day School charade. That one, or maybe two, foreign national 
theatres may not be much better is no apology. Such foreign 
theatres — the French, say — are less national theatres than one- 
city theatres, for Paris is France, But the American theatre 
spreads from coast to coast. What it spreads, I have herein 
tried to suggest. 

George Jean Nathan 



ECONOMIC OPINION 

IF there were conscious restriction upon the expression of 
opinion in America, this essay would possess the pompous 
certainty of an official document. Instead of threading its 
hazardous way through a mass of confused thought, it would 
record in formal terms acceptable utterance. In fact, the very 
restrictions upon thought and speech, with the aid of scissors 
and a license to speech, could easily be turned into a state- 
ment of the reputable theory of the welfare of the community. 

Unluckily, however, American life has not been arranged to 
make matters easy for the interpreter of economic opinion. 
Every American is conscious of a right to his own opinion 
about " why all of us taken together are as well off as we are " 
and " why some of us are better off and others of us worse off 
than the average of us." Whether this privilege comes from 
the Bill of Rights, the constitution of the United States, or his 
Simian ancestry, he could not say; but he is fully assured that 
it is " inalienable " and " indefeasible." No restriction of 
birth, breeding, position, or wealth limits his right to an 
opinion or persuades him to esteem his more fortunate neigh- 
bour's more highly than his own. Nor do intellectual limita- 
tions check the flow of words and of ideas. No one is exam- 
ined upon the growth of industrialism, the institutions which 
make up the economic order, or the nature of an industrial 
problem before he is allowed to speak. In fact, the idea that 
a knowledge of the facts about the subject under discussion, or 
of the principles to be applied to it, is essential to the right 
to an opinion is a strange notion little understood here. Even 
if occasionally some potentate attempts a mild restriction upon 
the spoken or the written word, it checks only those who talk 
directly and therefore clumsily. Its principal effect is through 
provocation to add mightily to the volume of opinion. 

The result is a conglomerate mass of opinion that sprawls 
through the known realm of economics and into regions un- 

2SS 



2 56 CIVILIZATION 

charted. The mighty men of finance spin a theory of national 
welfare in terms of foreign concessions no more glibly than 
the knights of the road in solemn convention solve with words 
the riddle of unemployment. The newly enfranchised women 
compete with the membersof theDynamiteClub in proposals for 
setting the industrial cosmos in order. Economic opinion bobs 
up in the financial journals, " the labour press," the periodicals 
of the " learned " societies, and in all the " Christian " advo- 
cates. It shows itself boldly in political speeches, in directors' 
reports, in public hearings, and in propagandist sheets. It 
lurks craftily in editorials, moving pictures, drawing-room lec- 
tures, poems, cartoons, and hymns. It ranges from the 
sonorous apologies for the existing order voiced by the Aaron 
Baal Professor of Christian Homiletics in the Midas Theologi- 
cal Seminary to the staccato denunciation of what is by the 
Sons of Martha Professor of Proletarian Tactics in the Karl 
Marx College for Workers. 

A mere semblance of order is given to this heterogeneous mass 
of opinion by the conditions which make it. A common system 
of legal, business, and social usages is to be found the coun- 
try over. This has left its impress too firmly in the assump- 
tions which underlie thought to allow this material to be sepa- 
rate bits from so many mental universes. The prevailing 
scheme of economic life is so definitely established as to force 
its imprint upon the opinion that moves about it. Acceptable 
opinion is created in its likeness, and unacceptable opinion be- 
comes acceptable opinion when the negatives are skilfully ex- 
tracted. Protestants are concerned rather with eliminating the 
" evils " of " capitalism " than with eradicating it root and 
branch. Protestantism is rather a variant of orthodox doctrine 
than an independent system of thought. Radical opinion that 
is likely to pass the decent bounds of negation is kept small 
in volume by a press which allows it little upon which to feed. 
Accordingly, varied doctrines wear the semblance of unity. 

Such elements, however, do not free this adventure into 
speculation from its perils. They merely make the hazards 
mortal. In the paragraphs below the economic opinion in 
America is recklessly resolved into four main classes. These 
are the laissez-faire opinion of the mid- 19th century, the con- 



ECONOMIC OPINION 257 

ventional " case for capitalism," the protestant demand for 
" control," and the academic insistence upon conscious " direc- 
tion " of industrial change. Radical opinion gets a competent 
judgment elsewhere in this volume. Even in this bold outline 
the opinions of small minorities are lost to sight, and views and 
doctrines, seemingly alien to the authors who know their subtle 
differences, are often blurred into a single picture. To avoid 
the charge that the lion and the lamb have been pictured as 
one, no names have been called. Here as elsewhere particulars 
will rise up to curse their generalizations, and the whole will 
be found to be entirely too scanty to be disbursed into its parts. 
But the chance must be taken, and, after all, truth does not 
reside in copy-book mottoes. 



The current types of economic opinion in this country all 
have a common origin. The men who express them are but 
a scant generation or two removed from the country or the 
small town. The opinions are so many variants of a stream 
of thought which goes back to a mid- 19th century America 
of small towns and open country. This primitive economic 
opinion was formed out of the dust of the ground in the like- 
ness of an exploitative America. The conditions which shaped 
it might be set forth in two lines of a school history thus: First, 
abundant natural resources; second, a scanty population; and 
third, the principle of letting the individual alone. 

It was a chance at an economic opportunity which made 
America of the 19th century the " land of promise." The raw 
materials of personal wealth were here in soil, stream, and mine. 
The equipment necessary to the crude exploitative farming of 
the time was easy to possess. Since there was an abundance, 
the resources essential to a chance at a living were to be had 
for the asking. One with enterprise enough to " go it alone " 
lived upon what he himself and his wealth in wife and chil- 
dren produced. He did not have to drive a shrewd bargain 
for the sale of his labour nor purchase the wherewithal to be 
fed and clothed in a market. There was no confusing scheme 
of prices to break the connection between effort and reward; 



2 58 CIVILIZATION 

opportunity and responsibility went hand in hand; success 
or failure was of one's own fashioning. Where nature does 
most, man claims all; and in rural America men were quite 
disposed to claim personal credit for nature's accomplishments. 
Since ample resources smothered even mediocre effort in plenty, 
the voice of chronic failure which blamed circumstance, fate, 
or " the system " was unheard. A freedom to have and to 
hold economic resources plentiful enough to supply all was 
the condition of material prosperity. 

Even when the lure of natural resources drew men from 
agriculture to industrial exploitation conditions did not change 
materially. The population of the new towns for a while kept 
at least one foot upon the soil. When at last the city possessed 
its people, aliens came out of Southeastern Europe to do the 
" dirty work," and the native born passed up into administra- 
tive, clerical, or professional positions. The alternative of 
farm emplojmient and the rapid expansion of industry fixed 
a rough minimum beneath which wages could not fall. The 
expanding machine technique with large scale production by 
quantity methods turned out an abundance of goods evidenced 
alike in lower prices and in higher standards of living. The 
" captains of industry " were regarded by the community as 
the creators of the jobs which they dispensed and as the effi- 
cient cause of the prosperity of the neighbourhood. The 
trickle of immigration that swelled to a " stream " and rose 
to a " tide " is an eloquent testimonial of the time paid by the 
peasantry of Europe to the success of the American system of 
letting the individual alone in his business. 

These conditions brought forth the lay economic theory 
acceptable to the national community. Its precepts came from 
experience, rather than from books; by intuition, rather than 
by reason. The welfare of the individual and the wealth of 
the nation were alike due to free institutions. In business 
and industry the individual was to be free to do as he pleased 
unless specifically forbidden by the State. The State was 
powerless to interfere with the individual unless granted spe- 
cific " constitutional " authority to do so. Each knew what 
he wanted and was able to take care of himself. The interests 
of all were an aggregate of the interests of individuals. The 



ECONOMIC OPINION 259 

prevailing scheme of institutions was accepted as a part of 
the immutable world of nature. Private property, if defended 
at all, was good because it gave the individual security and 
enabled him to enjoy the fruits of his own labour. The right 
of contract, exercised in a market characterized by " hig- 
gling," gave one an occasional adventure beyond the horizon 
of a household economy. If perchance the individual stum- 
bled into a bad bargain occasionally, so much the better. The 
mistake was a useful exercise in the development of the cardinal 
virtue of self-reliance. When the coming of industrialism 
made contract the basis of all industrial relations, the older 
justification was still used. Competition, with which it was 
always associated, was regarded as the prime agency in the 
organization of industry. It forced the elements of production 
into order and exercised a moral restraint over them. Under 
its regime men were rewarded in accordance with their deserts. 
In general, it was true beyond peradventure that " opportu- 
nity " knocked once " at every gate "; that there was " plenty 
of room at the top "; that each built the ladder by which he 
rose; and that even the humblest was " master of his 
fate." 

Out of such raw materials there was fashioned a body of 
professional economic theory. In a sense it was an imported 
product; for its earlier statement was that of Enghsh "classi- 
cal " economics. But in reality it was the return of an earher 
export, for accepted theory had been made from crude indi- 
vidualistic notions which England had got from America. In 
addition, at the hands of American economists it received a 
far more elaborate and articulate statement than had been 
given it overseas. These theorists used subtle analysis, pon- 
derous logic, and circumlocution; but their decorous processes 
brought them to much the same conclusions that practical men 
gained from their limited experiences. Its strength and its 
acceptability were wholly due to the precision and verbiage 
with which it reduced to formal terms the common-sense eco- 
nomics of the day. 

In its terms the economic order is made up of individuals. 
Each of these is actuated by the motive of self-interest. Each 
has for disposal personal services, goods, or property rights. 



2 6o CIVILIZATION 

Each must live upon goods and services purchased from others. 
Each must compete with his fellows in the sale of his wares 
and the purchase of his articles of livelihood. Because of the 
competition of sellers the wages of labour, the profits of capi- 
tal, and the prices of goods cannot be forced to untoward 
heights. Because of the competition of buyers they cannot be 
driven too low. The equilibrium of this double competitive 
process assures to each a return which represents the just value 
of the service, the property right, or the good. Prices, by mov- 
ing up and down in response to changing conditions, stimulate 
and retard consumption and production. Their very move- 
ment constantly reallocates resources to the production of a 
variety of goods and services in just the proportion which the 
consumers demand. In this theory the institutions which 
comprise the framework of the economic order are taken for 
granted. It has no place for an interference by the State with 
" private business." It regards monopoly as a thing to be 
abjured, whether appearing as a capitalistic combine or as a 
union of workingmen. In the Eden of free enterprise the com- 
munity's resources yield all they have and competition re- 
wards justly all the faithful who by serving themselves serve 
society. It is small wonder that sermons were preached upon 
" The Relation of Political Economy to Natural Theology." 



n 

The conditions which made the economic opinion of the 
America of small towns and open country are gone. With 
their passing the older theories have been reshaped to new 
purposes. There are no longer free economic opportunities 
for all comers. Natural resources have been appropriated, and 
the natural differences between men have been enhanced by 
the artificial ones of ownership and inheritance. Wealth and 
control have alike been stripped from the many and concen- 
trated in the few. The prevailing unit in business is the cor- 
poration. Establishments have been gathered into industries, 
and these have been articulated into a mighty industrial sys- 
tem, with its established rights, its customary ways of doing 
things, and its compulsions upon those who serve it. The 



ECONOMIC OPINION 261 

older personal relation of " master " and " servant " abides 
only in indices of the records of the law courts. The contract 
of employment is now between a " soulless " but " legal entity " 
and a mere creature of flesh and blood. The more human in- 
dividual, the survival of a less mechanical age, no longer lives 
upon the fruit of his individual toil. His welfare is pent in 
between his wages and the prices which he must pay for his 
necessities. Beyond this immediate bargain lies a mysterious 
economic system filled with unknown causes which threaten 
his income and even his employment. Those who possess have 
come into succession to those who ventured. In short, free 
enterprise has given way to an established system. 

These events have left their mark upon economic opinion. 
It is altogether fitting that those who fell heir to the wealth 
piled up by free enterprise should gain its outer defences of 
theory and dialectic. So the older economics, with its logic 
and its blessing, has come as a legacy to those who have. Its 
newer statement, because of its well-known objective, may be 
called " the case for capitalism." In its revision the adven- 
turous militarism bent upon exploitation has given way to a 
pacifistic defence of security, possession, and things as they 
are. 

In outward form few changes were necessary to convert the 
older theory of laissez-faire into a presentable case for capi- 
talism. A more rigid and absolute statement of the classical 
doctrine was almost enough. In its terms the economic order 
is independent of other social arrangements. It is an auto- 
matic, self-regulating mechanism. Over it there rules an im- 
mutable and natural " law of supply and demand." This 
maintains just prices, prevents exploitation, adjusts production 
and consumption to each other, secures the maximum of goods 
and services from the resources at hand, and disburses incomes 
in accordance with the merits of men and the verity of things. 
So just and impartial is the operation of this law that inter- 
ference by the State amounts to meddlesome muddling. It 
cannot override natural law; therefore it should not. 

It differs most from the older economics in the more explicit 
statement of the function of institutions. The growing in- 
equality of income, of control, and of opportunity have pre- 



2 62 CIVILIZATION 

sented facts that have to be faced. But even here, instead 
of contriving new defences, the advocates of capitalism have 
refurbished the older ones. The thing that is finds its justi- 
fication in that which was. Property rights are to be preserved 
intact, because private property is essential to personal oppor- 
tunity; just as if the propertyless did not exist and each was 
to win his living from his own acres or his own shop. The 
right of contract is not to be abridged, because the interests of 
both parties are advanced by a bargain between equals; just 
as if the corporate employer and the individual employe were 
alike in their freedom, their capacity to wait, and their power 
to shape the terms of the bargain. Prices are to be self- 
determined in open market, because competition will best 
reconcile the conflicting interests of buyers and sellers; just 
as if there was no semblance of monopoly among producers, 
no open price agreements, and no informal understandings. 
Individual initiative is not to be abridged, because it creates 
the wealth of the nation; just as if routine had no value for 
efficiency and the masses of men still had discretion in eco- 
nomic matters. The arrangements which make up the eco- 
nomic order find their validity in the symbolic language of 
ritual rather than in a prosaic recital of current fact. 

This defence crosses the frontier which separates the eco- 
nomic from the political order only to appropriate the pres- 
tige of democracy. Its real concern is the preservation of the 
prevailing system wherein business controls industry for pur- 
poses of profit. Its formal solicitation is lest " the form of 
government " be changed. This concern finds expression in 
veneration for the work of the " fathers " (rather young men, 
by the way), not of machine technology and business enter- 
prise, but of " representative government " and of " constitu- 
tional authority." Its creed becomes propaganda, not for the 
defence of business, the security of corporations, or the preser- 
vation of managerial immunities, but for the defence of the 
nation, the security of America, and the preservation of " con- 
stitutional " rights. The newer economic arrangements are 
masked behind political rights and given the values of the po- 
litical institutions which antedate them by many decades. In 
short, the staunchest defenders of the prevailing economic sys- 



ECONOMIC OPINION 263 

tern believe that " their economic preferences are shared by 
the constitution of the United States." 

If we may borrow a term from its advocates, this body of 
opinion must be pronounced " theoretical." In their speech 
a " theory " is a generalization which goes much further than 
its particulars warrant. In that sense their conclusions are not 
" practical." The essential question with which this body of 
opinion is concerned is whether the scheme of institutions 
which focus upon profit-making make the members of the 
community, severally and collectively, as well off as they 
ought to be. It seems offhand that a realistic defence of the 
prevailing order might be convincingly formulated. At any 
rate, " the case for capitalism " is good enough to get into the 
records. Instead, its advocates have confused their own pecu- 
niary success with the well-being of the community and have 
argued that because profits have been made the system is good. 
Like the classical economists they vindicate the system by 
assumption. 

in 

In the wake of the new industrialism there has come an 
economic opinion of protest. It is being gradually formulated 
by professional men, by farmers, by trade unionists, and by the 
younger business men who have escaped being " self-made," 
Its hesitating and confused statement is due to the disturbed 
conditions out of which it comes. The varied interests of its 
many authors prevents unity of words or of principles. Its 
origin in the contact of minds steeped in the older individualism 
with the arresting facts of the newer economic order explains 
its current inarticulate expression. It can be set forth briejfly 
only by subordinating the reality of variety to the tendencies 
which are clearly inherent within it. 

The objective of this newer opinion is a modification of the 
prevailing order, rather than its overthrow. It is quite con- 
scious of defects in its arrangements and knows that its fruits 
are not all good. It has never considered the question of the 
efficiency or inefficiency of the system as a whole. The older 
individualistic notions are strong enough to give an intuitive 
belief that the theory of the control of industry by business for 



2 64 CIVILIZATION 

profit is essentially sound. But it would eliminate the bad, 
patch up the indifferent, and retain the good. It would set up 
in the government an external authority which through regu- 
lation and repression would make business interests serve the 
community. Its faith is in private enterprise compelled by theJ 
State to promote " public welfare." Its detail can best be 
suggested by typical illustrations. 

There is, first of all, the attitude of the protestants towards 
freedom of contract. They accept the prevailing theory that 
the relations of buyer and seller, employer and employe, owner 
and agent, can safely be left to the free choice of all concerned. 
But they point out that in practice the principle does not give 
its assumed results. For, whereas the theory assumes the par- 
ties to be equal in their power to determine the terms of the 
contract, it is a matter of common knowledge that employers 
and labourers occupy unequal bargaining positions. They 
would leave relations to be determined by free bargaining; but, 
as a preliminary, they would attempt to establish equality of 
bargaining power. To that end they would have the contract 
made by " collective bargaining " between employers and em- 
ployes " through representatives " chosen by each. More- 
over, they would use the State to better the position of the 
weaker party. Thus legislation has been passed depriving 
employers of their right of requiring employes, as a condition 
of employment, not to remain members of labour unions. Al- 
though the courts have found such legislation to be " an arbi- 
trary interference with the liberty of contract which no gov- 
ernment can justify in a free land," its advocates will insist 
that their aim has been only " to establish that equality in po- 
sition between the parties in which liberty of contract begins." 

There is, in the next place, a growing opinion among the 
protestants that the State is " a moral agent " and should 
determine the rules under which business is to be carried on. 
They point out that in business there are bad as well as good 
conditions, that business men engage in proper as well as in 
improper practices, and that some activities harm while others 
help the community. In many instances the employer finds 
it to his advantage to establish conditions which the interests 
of the workers and of the consumers require. In others, the 



ECONOMIC OPINION 265 

elevation of standards waits upon the pleasure of the most 
inconsiderate employer. The prohibition of child labour, the 
shortening of the working day, and the payment of a minimum 
wage may be advantageous alike to labourers and to the com- 
munity; yet these innovations involve an increase in cost and 
cannot be made against the competition of the producer who 
will not establish them. In such cases it is the duty of the 
State to establish minimum conditions which must be met by 
all employers. The imposition of such standards in no way- 
affects the system under which business is carried on; foe 
the competition of rival sellers can be just as acute and just 
as considerate of the public, if all of them are forced to pay 
their employes a living wage, as if they are all free to force 
wages down to starvation. Upon this theory the State has es- 
tablished uniform weights and measures, prohibited the use 
of deleterious chemicals, stopped the sale of impure food, pro- 
vided compensation for the human wear and tear of industry, 
and established minimum standards of safety, health, and 
service. 

There is, finally, a growing opinion that in some industries 
the profit-making motive must be superseded by some other. 
In the railway industry it has been repeatedly shown that the 
pecuniary interest of the management fails to coincide with, 
that of either the owners or of the shippers. Long ago the 
determination of charges for service was put beyond the dis- 
cretion of the officials. Of late there has been an increasing 
tendency to make accounts, services, expenditures, valuations, 
and other matters meet standards of public service. When 
this has been effected, as it will be, the officials of the roads 
will become mere subordinates responsible to a public au- 
thority. Then profit-making as a guide to administration will 
have given way to an official judgment of results in terms of 
established standards. Then it will be discovered that public 
control formally rejected has been achieved by indirection. 
But many times ere this American opinion has come by devious 
paths to goals which its individualism has not allowed it to 
regard as quite desirable. 

For the moment the medley of opinion here roughly charac- 
terized as a demand for control is dominant. Its proponents 



266 CIVILIZATION 

are almost as naive as the advocates of capitalism in a belief 
in the essential goodness of a mythical system of " free enter- 
prise." They differ from them in placing greater emphasis 
upon voluntary associations and in demanding that the State 
from without compel business to serve the common good. 
As yet they have formulated no consistent theory of economics 
and no articulate programme for achieving their ends. With- 
out a clear understanding of the development of industry and 
of the structure of the economic order, they are content to face 
specific problems when they meet them. They are far from 
ready to surrender an inherited belief in an individualistic 
theory of the common good. 



IV 

The changes of the last four decades, which make up " The 
Industrial Revolution in America," have left their mark upon 
the economics of the schools. If there was a time when the 
thought of the professed economists was a thing apart from 
the common sense of the age, it ended with the coming of in- 
dustrialism. Differ as it may in phrase, in method, and in 
statement, the economics in solid and dull treatises reflects, as 
it has always reflected, the opinions of the laity. If there 
were agreement among the sorts of men who gather at ball 
games and in smoking cars, the books on economics would all 
read alike. But when the plumber differs from the banker 
and the scrub woman refuses to take her ideas from the coupon 
clipper, it is futile to expect mere economists to agree. To 
some, the classical doctrine still serves as a sabbatical refuge 
from modern problems. Others, who " specialize " in trusts, 
tariffs, and labour are too busy being " scientific " to formu- 
late general opinions. Still others insist upon creating a new 
economics concerned with the problem of directing industrial 
development to appointed ends. Each of these schools has a 
membership large enough to allow dissension within the ranks. 

The revolt against the classical economics began when it 
encountered modern fact. Beyond the pale of doctrine taught 
by certified theorists appeared studies upon corporations, in- 
ternational trade, railway rates, craft unionism, and other mat- 



ECONOMIC OPINION 267 

ters of the newer fact. For a time those who studied these 
subjects were content to describe in superficial terms the re- 
sults of their observations. But as facts accumulated they pro- 
voked generalizations at variance with the accepted princi- 
ples of the older competitive theory. At the same time the 
rise of a newer history concerned with development rather 
than chronology, a new ethics that recognized the existence 
of a social order, and a new psychology that taught that the 
content of men's behaviour is poured in by the environment, 
together made the foundations of the older economics very 
insecure. 

For a time this protest found expression only in critical 
work. The picture of an economic order as a self -regulating 
mechanism, peopled with folk who could not but serve the 
community in serving themselves became very unreal. The 
complexity of industrialism made it hard to believe that the 
individual had knowledge enough to choose best for himself. 
The suspicion that frequently thought follows action made it 
hard to continue to believe in man's complete rationality. The 
idea that incomes are different because opportunities are dif- 
ferent led to a questioning of the justice of the ratings of men 
in the market. The unequal division of income made impos- 
sible pecuniary calculations in which each man counted for 
one and only for one. With these assumptions of 19th-century 
economics passed " the economic man," " the Crusoe econ- 
omy," and the last of the divine theories, that of " enlightened 
self-interest." It was no longer possible to build a defence of 
the existing order upon " the hedonistic conception of man " 
as " a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates 
like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the 
impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave 
him inert." 

The most immediate effect of this criticism was a change 
in method. The older process of juggling economic laws out 
of assumptions about human nature, human motives, and the 
beneficence of competition lost prestige. It was evident that 
if the system was to be appraised the facts must be had. Ac- 
cordingly a veritable multitude of facts, good, bad, and mostly 
indifferent were treasured up. This process of garnering in- 



2 68 CIVILIZATION 

formation soon made it evident that the facts about the rela- 
tionship of industry to the welfare of the community were too 
varied and too numerous to be separately catalogued. Since 
only totals could be used, economics came to rely upon facts 
presented in the quantitative language of statistics. 

But since facts are not possessed of the virtue of self- 
determination, they did not yield an opinion which was very 
relevant or very truthful. Their use was for the moment 
nothing more than a substitution of the superstition of facts 
for that of logic. The facts were of value, because when prop- 
erly interpreted they gave the story of what the economic 
system had done. But without the aid of standards it was 
impossible to determine whether it had worked well or ill, 
whether it had much or little to give in return for the solicitous 
concern about it. It was evident that modern industrialism 
was developing without conscious guidance. As long as no 
goal was fixed it was impossible to tell whether industrial devel- 
opment was proceeding in the right direction. As long as we 
were unmindful of the kind of society we wished ours to be, 
we could not appraise its accomplishments. Without stand- 
ards all that could be said was that the system had worked as 
well as it had worked and that we were as well off as we were 
well off. The problem, therefore, became one of judging the 
system on the basis of the facts by means of standards. 

Thus the newer economics has been of service in stating the 
problem with which opinion must be concerned. The " pre- 
vailing " economic order is one of many schemes of arrange- 
ments for making industry serve the purposes of the com- 
munity. The system has been slowly evolved out of the in- 
stitutions of the past, is constantly being affected by circum- 
stances, and for the future is capable of conscious modifica- 
tion. How well it has served its purpose cannot be attested by 
an abstract argument proceeding from assumptions about hu- 
man nature and the cosmos. A Judgment upon its relative 
goodness or badness requires an appraisal of the facts in terms 
of standards. These standards must be obtained from our 
notions of the kind of society we want this to be. These no- 
tions must proceed from a scientific study of the properties 
of things and the needs of human beings. That judgment will 



ECONOMIC OPINION 269 

be one not of goodness or badness, but of the relative merits of 
a very human scheme of arrangements compared with its 
alternatives. 

The economists are reluctant to pass a judgment upon the 
prevailing order. The relevant facts are too scanty and the 
standards too inexact to warrant an appraisal of the virtues 
and the vices of " capitalism." They distrust the eulogies of 
apologists because they do not square with the known facts. 
They are not convinced by the reformers, because they fear 
that they know as little about their own schemes as they do 
about current arrangements. They insist that a general judg- 
ment must be a progressive affair. The system will change 
through gradual modification ; the larger problem will be solved 
by attention to an endless succession of minor problems. Each 
of these must be met with the facts and with an ideal of what 
our society should be. They have too little faith in the ration- 
ality of the collect to believe that problems can be faced in 
battalions or that a new order can emerge as a work of crea- 
tion. They have little fear for " the future of the nation/' if 
only problems can be intelligently handled as they emerge. 
Their attitude towards the present system is one, neither of 
acceptance nor of rejection, but of doubt and of honest in- 
quiry. Their faith is neither in the existing order nor in a 
hand-me-down substitute, but in a conscious direction of the 
process of change. 

This tedious narrative has failed entirely in its purpose, if 
it has not revealed the strength and the weakness of economic 
opinion in America. Its merits stand out boldly in the pre- 
ceding paragraphs; its defects are too striking to be concealed. 
The reader has already been informed; but the writer must 
inform himself. The essay, therefore, will close with an ex- 
plicit statement of some three of the more obvious charac- 
teristics. 

First, its most striking characteristic is its volume. In 
quantity it contains enough verbal and intellectual ammuni- 
tion to justify or to wreck a dozen contradictory economic 
orders. If, in an orderly way, opinion became judgment and 
judgment ripened into the society of to-morrow, it would stand 



2 70 CIVILIZATION 

condemned. For little of it has a practical consequence and 
our ways of expression are very wasteful. But it also affords 
a harmless outlet for the dangerous emotions aroused by the 
wear and tear of everyday work in a humdrum universe. And, 
if it is true that we are, all of us, Simians by lineage, this is by 
far the most important function it serves. 

Second, it is grounded none too well in information and 
principles. The ordinary mortal is busied with his own 
affairs. He lacks the time, the patience, and the equipment 
necessary to get at the facts about the material welfare of the 
nation. In the most casual way he makes up his mind, using 
for the purpose a few superficial facts, a number of prejudices, 
and a bit of experience. He has little idea of where we are 
in the course of social development, of the forces which have 
brought us here, or of where we ought to be going. Since the 
opinions of groups and of the nation are aggregates of indi- 
vidual opinion, the ideas of those who have an intellectual right 
to speak are not a large part of the compound. 

Third, despite its crudeness and variety, it possesses ele- 
ments of real value. Its very volume creates at least a statis- 
tical probability that some of it is of high quality. The waste 
of much of it gives the rest a real chance of expression in 
social policy. The common features of industrialism are giv- 
ing to men something of a common experience out of which 
there will come a more or less common-sense appreciation of 
problems and of ideals. This will dictate the larger features 
of a future social policy. The particularized opinion which 
finds expression in the detailed formulation of programmes 
must be left to the experts. The great masses of men must 
learn that these problems are technical and must trust the 
judgment of those who know. Despite the record of halting 
development and cf confused statement, the pages above indi- 
cate that the economic opinion in America is coming slowly 
to an appreciation of the factors upon which " the good life 
for all " really rests. 

But enough. Opinion by being economic does not cease to 
be opinion, and an essay about it is only more opinion. 

Walton H. Hamilton 



RADICALISM 

THE first obstacle to an assessment of radicalism in Amer- 
ica is the difficulty of discovering precisely what American 
radicalism is. According to his enemies, a radical is a person 
whose opinions need not be considered and whose rights need 
not be respected. As a people we do not wish to understand 
him, or to deal with what he represents, but only to get him 
out of sight. We deport him and imprison him. If he writes 
a book, we keep it out of the schools and Hbraries. If he pub- 
lishes a paper, we debar it from the mails. If he makes a 
speech, we drive him out of the hall and shoo him away from 
the street-corner. If by hook or crook he multiplies himself 
to considerable numbers, we expel his representatives from 
legislative chambers, break up his parades, and disperse his 
strikes with well-armed soldiery. 

These being the associations which cluster about the word, 
it has naturally become less a definition than a weapon. Statis- 
ticians in the Federal Trade Commission publish certain figures 
dealing with the business of the packing-houses — a Senator 
loudly calls these devoted civil servants " radicals," and they 
are allowed to resign. A labour leader, following the prece- 
dent of federal law established for over a half a century, 
espouses the eight-hour day, but because he has the bad taste 
to do so in connection with the steel industry, he becomes a 
" radical," and is soundly berated in the press. If one were 
to ask the tj^Dical American Legion member how he would 
describe a radical — aside from the fact that a radical is a 
person to be suppressed — he would probably answer that a 
radical is (a) a pro-German, (b) a Russian or other for- 
eigner, (c) a person who sends bombs through the mail, (d) 
a behever in free love, (e) a writer of free verse, (f) a painter 
of cubist pictures, (g) a member of the I.W.W., (h) a So- 
cialist, (i) a Bolshevist, (j) a believer in labour unions and 
an opponent of the open shop, and (k) any one who would 



2 72 CIVILIZATION 

be looked upon with disapproval by a committee consisting of 
Judge Gary, Archibald Stevenson^ and Brander Matthews. 

There is scarcely more light to be had from the radicals 
themselves. Any one who feels a natural distaste for the 
censorious crowd of suppressors is likely to class himself with 
the free spirits whom they oppose. To call oneself a radical 
is in such circumstances a necessary accompaniment of self- 
respect. The content of the radicalism is of minor impor- 
tance. There is an adventurous tendency to espouse anything 
that is forbidden, and so to include among one's affirmations 
the most contradictory systems — such as Nietzscheanism and 
Communism, Christianity of the mystical sort and rebellion. 
And when these rebels really begin to think, the confusion is 
increased. Each pours his whole ardour into some exclusive 
creed, which makes him scorn other earnest souls who happen 
to disagree about abstruse technical points. Among economic 
radicals, terms like " counter-revolutionary " and " bourgeois " 
are bandied about in a most unpleasant fashion. If, for in- 
stance, you happen to believe that Socialism may be brought 
about through the ballot rather than through the general strike, 
numbers of radicals will believe you more dangerous than the 
Czar himself; it is certain that when the time comes you will 
be found fighting on the wrong side of the barricade. Creeds 
have innumerable subdivisions, and on the exact acceptance 
of the creed depends your eternal salvation. Calvinists, 
Wesleyans, Lutherans, and the rest in their most exigent days 
could not rival the logical hair-splitting which has lately taken 
place among the sectarian economic dissenters, nor has any 
religious quarrel ever surpassed in bitterness the dogmatic 
dissidence with which the numerous schools of authoritarian 
rebellion rebel against authority. 

There is a brilliant magazine published in New York which 
takes pride in edging a littl-e to tJie left of the leftmost radical, 
wherever for the moment that may be. Its editor is a poet, 
and he writes eloquently of the proletariat and the worker. 
Not long ago I was speaking of this editor to an actual leader 
of labour — a man who is a radical, and who also takes a daily 
part in the workers' struggles. " Yes," he said, " he certainly 



RADICALISM 273 

can write. He is one of the best writers living." And he 
went on wistfully, " If the labour movement only had a writer 
like that! " 

There is another brilliant magazine published in New York 
which takes exquisite pains to inform the reader that it is 
radical. In precise columns of elegant type, Puritan in its 
scorn of passion or sensation, it weekly derides the sentimental 
liberal for ignorance of " fundamental economics." Not long 
ago it made the startling discovery that Socialists favour tak- 
ing natural resources out of private ownership. And its " fun- 
damental economics," whenever they appear in language sim- 
ple enough for the common reader to understand, turn out to 
be nothing more dangerous than that respectable and ancient 
heresy, the single tax. 

Another method of definition is now in common use — a 
method which seems easy because of its mechanical simplicity. 
People are arranged in a row from left to right, according to 
their attitude toward the existing order. At the extreme right 
are the reactionaries, who want to restore the discarded. Next 
to them are the conservatives, who wish to keep most of what 
exists. At their elbow are the liberals, who are ready to ex- 
amine new ideas, but who are not eager or dogmatic about 
change. And at the extreme left are the radicals, who want 
to change nearly everything for something totally new. Such 
an arrangement is a confusing misuse of words based on a mis- 
conception of social forces. Society is not a car on a track, 
along which it may move in either direction, or on which it may 
stand still. Society is a complex, with many of the charac- 
teristics of an organism. Its change is continuous, although 
by no means constant. It passes through long periods of 
quiescence, and comparatively brief periods of rapid mutation. 
It may collect itself into a close order, or again become dis- 
persed into a nebula. There is much in its development that 
is cyclical ; it has yet undiscovered rhythms, and many vagaries. 
The radical and the reactionary may be agreed on essentials; 
they may both wish sudden change and closer organization. 
The conservative may be liberal because he wishes to preserve 
an order in which liberal virtues may exist. Or a liberal may 



2 74 CIVILIZATION 

be so cribbed and confined by an unpleasant constriction of 
social tissue that he becomes radical in his struggle for imme- 
diate release. The terms are not of the same class and should 
not be arranged in parallel columns. 

The dictionary definition is enlightening. " Radical — Going 
to the root or origin; touching or acting upon what is essen- 
tial or fundamental; thorough. . . , Radical reform, a thor- 
ough reform. . . . Hence Radical Reformer equals Radical " 
(New English Dictionary). In this sense radicalism is an 
historic American tradition. The revolt of the Colonies 
against England and the formation of the Republic were, in- 
deed, far from the complete break with the past which the 
schoolboy assumes them to have been, but what lives in the 
minds of the American people is, nevertheless, not the series 
of counterchecks which men like Hamilton and Madison wrote 
into the Constitution, but rather the daring affirmations of 
Jefferson which have a real kinship with the radical spirit of 
the French Revolution. Talk of " inalienable rights " such 
as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was genuine radi- 
cal talk; it searched out the bases of human relationship, pro- 
claimed them against authority, and sought to found on them a 
system of government. 

So strongly has this conception seized the imagination of 
Americans that it largely accounts for their almost instinctive 
hostility to new kinds of political change. The roots of poli- 
tics have been uncovered, the change has in fact been made 
once for all — so they reason. To admit that any new funda- 
mental alteration is necessary is to be disloyal to the historical 
liberation. Because the conservative American believes him- 
self a complete democrat, because for him the " new order " 
was achieved in 1776, he is intolerant of modern radicals. 
Suggestions of new revolution touch him closely on his pride. 
In this sense Jefferson has been less a spur to future genera- 
tions than an obstacle. If his fine frenzy about rights had 
been less eloquently expressed, if it had not obscured in a 
cloud of glory the true nature of the foundation of our govern- 
ment — a highly practical compromise which embodied a few 
moderate advances and many hesitancies — we should have a 
different temper about change to-day. We should not assume 



RADICALISM 275 

that all desirable fundamental modification of social and po- 
litical structure had been completed nearly a century and a 
half ago. 

The greatest historic expression of American radicalism has 
thus become the altar of the conservatives. To the unlettered 
man it may seem strange that a Supreme Court of elderly 
radicals will not allow Congress to forbid child-labour because 
of their loyalty to an 18th-century limitation of the federal 
government, presumably in the interest of freedom and hu- 
manity. To workmen voting for the eight-hour day the lan- 
guage of Jefferson did not seem hostile — they were struggling 
to pursue happiness in a way that he must have approved. 
And yet it is the sacred " right " of contract which deprived 
them^ as voters, of the right to legislate for shorter hours. 
Workmen using their collective economic power to gain indus- 
trial freedom are met by a shower of injunctive denials, based 
chiefly on that same right of contract. In order to stay any 
further liberation of the human body and spirit, judges and 
officials and industrial barons have only to invoke the phrases 
of freedom thrown out against an ancient despotism. They 
have only to point out that freedom as defined abstractly over 
a hundred years ago forbids practical freedom to-day. Frozen 
radicalism of the past chills and destroys the new roots of 
American life. 

Some appreciation of this state of affairs underlies the pre- 
vailing tendency to believe that all new radicalism has a for- 
eign origin. It is, indeed, part of the best nationalistic tradi- 
tion to attribute subversive doctrines to foreigners. This is 
the habit in every country. But in the United States the habit 
is perhaps more deep-seated than elsewhere. Americans are 
by definition free and equal; if then any one talks or acts as 
if he were not free and equal, he must have been born some- 
where else. The American Government, being not a faulty 
product of human growth, but a new creation sprung perfect 
out of the ineffable minds of the Fathers, is unassailable; if 
any one assails it, he cannot know it, and must be subjected 
to courses in English and Civics (Americanization) until he 
recognizes its perfection. Treason in this country is not simple 
treason to a ruler, to a class, or to a system as elsewhere; it 



2 76 CIVILIZATION 

is an act of sacrilege, by one uninitiated, upon a religious 
mystery. 

Of course there are and have been Americans whose radi- 
calism is less crust and more meat. The spirit of Jefferson 
still lives, after all, to confute the interpretation put upon his 
words. And imported doctrine has actually had less to do with 
most of the radical movements in America than has American 
tradition itself. It is an easy step from the conception of po- 
litical liberty to the conception of economic liberty, and the 
step has been made here as readily as in Europe. In a country 
which for so long offered extraordinary opportunities to the 
individual business man, it is only natural that economic lib- 
erty should have been conceived as a means of protecting his 
enterprise; and as a matter of fact our economic legislation for 
many years has been sprinkled with victories of the small 
business men and farmers over the interests which had already 
become large enough to seem to them oppressive. The regu- 
lation of the railroads, the succession of popular financial doc- 
trines, and the anti-trust legislation, were all initiated by the 
interpretation of economic democracy naturally arising in the 
vigorous class of the small entrepreneurs. With the slow weak- 
ening of this class by its disintegration, on one hand into cap- 
tains and lieutenants of the great principalities of industry, 
and on the other into permanently salaried or waged members 
of the rank and file, comes a corresponding tendency to change 
the prevailing conception of economic democracy. The radi- 
calism of workmen in the United States has often been no 
less sweeping or assertive than the radicalism of workmen any^ 
where — witness the I.W.W. Even violence in the labour 
struggle has been practised chiefly by one hundred per cent. 
Americans — the steel workers in Homestead in 1892 and the 
West Virginia miners in Mingo County in 192 1 were of old 
American stock. And the moment the predominating group 
in American thought and activity is composed of those who 
expect to live by their daily work rather than of those who 
expect to accumulate property, we are likely to see the rise of 
an economic radicalism more akin to that which exists in 
Europe, and one which, because of its sanction in our tradi- 
tion, will be twice as militant and convinced. 



RADICALISM 277 

For, after all, economic radicalism arises neither from a 
merely stupid desire for more material goods, nor from an in- 
tellectual adherence to a particular formula of industrial or- 
ganization. It arises from a desire to be free, to achieve 
dignity and independence. Poverty is distressful not so much 
because of its physical hardships as because of its spiritual 
bondage. To be poor because one chooses to be poor is less 
annoying than to be moderately paid while the man who fixes 
one's wages rides in a Rolls-Royce. The most modest aspects 
of the labour movement are attempts of the workmen to gain 
some voice in determining the conditions under which they 
must work — in other words, to extend democracy into indus- 
try. And when the workman wakes up to the fact that indus- 
trial policies are governed by a comparatively small class of 
owners, and that the visible result of those policies seems to 
be a large class of underemployed, undernourished, and under- 
housed families on one hand, and a small class of abundantly 
supplied families on the other, he feels that he is suffering an 
indignity. You may challenge him to prove that any other 
system would work better. You may argue that if all the 
wealth of the rich were distributed equally, he would receive 
but a trifle. Such reasoning will affect him little. If every 
one must be miserable, he at least wants to share and exercise 
whatever power exists to alter that misery. Kings have argued 
that the people could rule no better than they, but that has not 
prevented peoples from demanding representative government. 
The American tradition is sure to be as subversive a motive 
in industry as it has been in the State. The technical prob- 
lem of how industry may be better organized, important as it 
is, is subordinate to this cry of the personality. Essentially, 
this sort of radicalism arises from the instinct of the workman 
to achieve an adult relationship to the industrial world. 

The impact of the war upon industry, and the reverberation 
of its social results abroad, for some time stimulated this 
latent feeling in American workmen. For the first time in 
decades the competition of the unemployed and the immigrant 
was virtually removed, and the wage-earner began to feel se- 
cure enough to assert his personality. He was necessary to 
the community in an immediate way. The policy of the gov- 



2 78 CIVILIZATION 

ernment was to recognize this fact, and to prevent an unduly 
rapid increase in wages and in the power of organized labour 
by compromising with it on certain simple issues like collective 
bargaining and the eight-hour day. But larger aspirations 
arose in the rank and file, and when the Russian Revolution 
sent a word of emancipation around the world, they were ready 
to listen. In spite of the crushing force of the whole ruling 
propaganda machinery, which had been so successful in arous- 
ing hatred against Germany, countless American workmen 
sensed the approach of a new order as a result of the success 
of the Bolsheviki. A secondary impulse of the same sort, felt 
even more strongly in some quarters, arose from the Notting- 
ham programme of the British Labour Party. But affairs 
moved slowly, hope was deferred, and at length the new spirit 
lost much of its freshness and power. The very acrimonious- 
ness and volume of the controversy over what had or had not 
been done in Russia wearied most people of the whole matter. 
The many expected revolutions in other countries, which missed 
fire so many times, caused disillusionment. The doctrinaire 
and even religious adherents of the Russian Communists be- 
gan to make trouble for every radical organization in the coun- 
try by their quarrels and divisions. At length, the war being 
over, the American labour movement itself began to display 
a weakness in the face of renewed attack on the part of its 
opponents, which showed how illusory had been many of its 
recent gains and how seriously its morale had been injured. 

Economic radicalism never looked — on the surface — weaker 
than it does in the United States to-day. On the strength of 
statements by Mr. Gompers and some other leaders of the 
trade unions, we are likely to assume that organized labour 
will have nothing to do with it. The professed radicals them- 
selves have been weakened by dissensions and scattered by 
persecution. Yet a brief survey of the formal groups which 
now profess radical theories will indicate why the future of 
American radicalism should not be assessed on the evidence of 
their present low estate. 

The Socialist Party, even more than the Socialist Parties in 
other countries, was placed by the war in a difficult situation. 



RADICALISM 279 

With its roots not yet firmly in the soil, except in a few lo- 
calities and among diverse national elements, it was faced with 
the necessity, in accordance with its principles and tradition, 
of denouncing the entrance of the United States into hostilities. 
But this decision could command no effective support from 
the workers organized on the economic field, who under a 
different leadership adopted a different attitude. Nor was the 
party strong enough among any other element of the popu- 
lation to make its decision respected. The only immediate 
result of the gesture was therefore to place this unarmed little 
force in the most exposed position possible, where it drew the 
fire of all those who were nervously afraid the people would 
not sanction the war. Socialism was not judged on the basis 
of its economic tenets, but was condemned as disloyal and 
pro-German; and the effect was to render the party even more 
sectarian and unrepresentative than ever before. It had 
adopted a position in which it could not expect recruits except 
from moral heroes, and no nation nourishes a large proportion 
of these. Such episodes make good legend, but they do not 
lead to prompt victories. Even those who later have come to 
believe that the Socialists were right about the war are likely 
to express their belief in some other form than joining the 
party. 

In this weakened condition^ the Socialist Party after the war 
developed internal fissures. Many bitter words have been 
exchanged as to whether the " Left Wingers " were or were not 
a majority of the party, whether they were or were not more 
orthodox than those in control of the party machinery, and 
whether, if they were more orthodox, their orthodoxy was wise. 
At any rate, they broke away and formed two new parties of 
their own, a fact which is the chief point of interest to one 
who is more concerned with the larger issues of American 
radicalism than with the minutiae of Socialist politics. The 
Communist Party and the Communist Labour Party, what- 
ever may have been the legitimacy of their gestation in the 
bowels of Socialism, certainly found their reason for being 
chiefly in logic which originated in Moscow and Berlin rather 
than in the American situation. At once selected for perse- 



2 8o CIVILIZATION 

cution by government officials, they burrowed underground, 
doubtless followed by a band of spies at least as numerous as 
they. From these subterranean regions have come rumours 
of a fourth party — the United Communist, which swallowed 
most of the Communist Labourites and some of the Com- 
munists. At last accounts the Communists and the United 
Communists were each attempting to prove the other counter- 
revolutionary by reference to the latest documents from inter- 
national revolutionary headquarters. 

It is hazardous in the extreme for an outsider to speak of 
the differences in doctrine among these groups. It is probably 
fair to say, however, that the Communist parties are chiefly 
distinguished by their total lack of interest in anything save 
a complete revolution, because this is the only kind they be- 
lieve possible. They reject as " compromises " partial gains 
of all sorts; piecemeal progress by evolutionary methods rather 
offends them than otherwise. Their eyes are turned always 
toward some future revolutionary situation; for this their or- 
ganization and their theories are being prepared. This being 
the case, the validity of their position will be tested by the 
event. If, as the milder Socialists believe, economic changes 
may come gradually by process of growth and smaller shocks, 
the Communists are likely to remain a nearly functionless 
and tiny minority, even in the labour movement. If, as the 
Communists believe, the present order in the normal course of 
its development is destined to experience a sudden collapse 
simitlar to that which occurred in Russia near the end of the 
war, they will become the true prophets, and their mode of 
thought and action will presumably have fitted them to assume 
leadership. 

The Farmer-Labour Party is a recent growth far less doc- 
trinaire than either the Socialist or the Communist groups. 
It has neither prophet nor Bible, but is based rather on the 
principle of gathering certain categories of people together for 
political action, trusting that as they become organized they 
will work out their own programme in relation to the situation, 
and that that programme will develop as tirne goes on. The 
categories to which it appeals are chiefly the industrial work- 
ers and the small farmers, who have in general common eco- 



RADICALISM 281 

nomic interests as opposed to the large owners of land and 
capital. It hopes that other elements in the population, re- 
alizing that their major interests are much the same as those 
of the unionists and the farmers, will join forces with them 
to produce a majority. As an illustration of the operation of 
such tactics, the Farmer-Labourites point to the success of the 
Independent Labour Party of Great Britain, first in aiding the 
foundation of the British Labour Party, and second in build- 
ing up for that party an increasingly coherent radical pro- 
gramme. 

In all these cases, however, not much confidence is placed in 
the actual political machinery of elections. There is a wide- 
spread scepticism about the ability to accomplish industrial 
changes by the ballot, on account of experience with political 
corruption, broken election promises, adverse court decisions, 
and political buncombe in general. These parties are formed as 
much for the purpose of propagating ideas and creating centres 
of activity as for mobilizing votes. All radical parties lay 
great stress on the industrial power of the organized labour 
movement. This is not to say that they do not recognize the 
importance of the State in industrial matters. All agree that 
control of political machinery will in the long run be necessary, 
if only to prevent it from checking the advance of the people 
through the courts and police. But they also agree that con- 
trol of the State is not held and cannot be attained by poli- 
tical machinery alone. The present influence of the pro- 
prietors of industry on politics is due, they see, chiefly to eco- 
nomic power, and the workers consequently must not neglect 
the development of their own economic organization. The 
Communists are completely hopeless of attaining results 
through the present election machinery; the Socialists and 
Farmer-Labourites believe it possible to secure a majority at 
the polls, which may then execute its will, if the workers are 
well enough organized for industrial action. 

Outwardly the most successful of the radical movements is 
the least doctrinaire of all. It is unnecessary to repeat the 
history and achievements of the Nonpartisan League — an at- 
tempt on the part of organized farmers to use the machinery 
of the State in order to gain economic independence from the 



2 82 CIVILIZATION 

banking, milling, and packing interests. Other groups of 
farmers have aimed at a similar result through co-operation, 
with varying success. 

In the industrial labour movement proper there have been 
numerous radical minorities. The most uncompromising of 
these, as well as the most characteristically American, was the 
Industrial Workers of the World, who aspired to build up a 
consciously revolutionary body to rival the unions composing 
the American Federation of Labour. This decline is due not 
so much to suppression as to their previous failure to enlist the 
continued support of the industrial workers themselves. Like 
the Communists, the I.W.W. predicated their success on a revo- 
lutionary situation, and lacking that situation they could not 
build a labour movement on an abstract idea. Over long 
periods not enough people are moved by a philosophy of sal- 
vation to give staying power to such an organization in the 
daily struggle with the employers. Other similar attempts, 
such as the W.I.I.U., and the more recent One Big Union, 
have encountered similar difficulties. They grow rapidly in 
crises, but fail under the strain of continued performance. 

The failure of American radicals to build up a strong move- 
ment is in part due, of course, to the natural difficulties of the 
social and economic situation, but it is also due to the mental 
traits which usually accompany remoteness from reality. This 
is illustrated in the history of the I.W.W., if we accept William 
Z. Foster's acute analysis. The regular trade-union move- 
ment, slowly evolving towards a goal but half consciously 
realized, overcoming practical obstacles painfully and clumsily, 
as such obstacles usually are overcome, was too halting for 
these impatient radicals. They withdrew, and set up rival, 
perfectionist unions, founded in uncompromising revolutionary 
ardour. These organizations were often unable to serve the 
rank and file in their practical difficulties, and consequently 
could not supplant the historic labour movement. But they 
did draw out of that movement many of its most sincere and 
ardent spirits, thus depriving it of the ferment which was 
necessary to its growth. The I.W.W., for their part, failing 
to secure any large grip on reality, regressed into quarrels 
about theory, suffered divisions of their social personality, and 



RADICALISM 283 

at length — except in the far West — became little more than 
economic anchorites. As Foster says, " The I.W.W. were 
absolutely against results." 

Too much of American radicalism has been diverted to 
the easy emotional satisfaction which is substituted for the 
arduous process of dealing with reality. We suffer a restric- 
tion of the personality, we cry out against the oppressor, we 
invent slogans and doctrines, we fill our minds with day dreams, 
with intricate mechanisms of some imaginary revolution. At 
the same time we withdraw from the actual next step. Here 
is the trade-union movement, built up painfully for over a cen- 
tury, a great army with many divisions which function every 
day in the industrial struggle. How many radicals know it 
in any detail? How many have paid the slightest attention to 
the technique of its organization, or have devoted any time to 
a working out of the smaller problems which must be worked 
out before it can achieve this or that victory? Here are our 
great industries, our complex systems of exchange. How many 
radicals really know the technique of even the smallest sec- 
tion of them? Radicals wish to reorganize the industrial sys- 
tem; would they know how to organize a factory? 

If radicalism arises from the instinct for economic maturity, 
then it can find its place in the world only by learning its func- 
tion, only by expressing its emotion in terms of the actual with 
which it has to deal. A period of adolescence was to be ex- 
pected, but to prolong the characteristics of that period is to 
invite futility. And as a matter of fact American radicalism 
now exhibits a tendency to establish more contacts with re- 
ality. Instead of withdrawing from established unions to start 
a new and spotless labour movement, radicals are beginning 
to visualize and to carry out the difficult but possible task of 
improving the organization of the existing unions, and of charg- 
ing them with new energy and ideas. Unions which were 
founded by radicals — such as the Amalgamated Clothing Work- 
ers of America — are devoting their efforts not to talking of a 
future revolution, but to organizing the workers more firmly 
in the present, to establishing constitutional government in 
industry through which tangible advances may be made and 
safeguarded, and to improving the productivity of industry it- 



284 CIVILIZATION 

self. Engineers, encouraged by labour organizations, and in 
some cases actually paid by them, are investigating the prob- 
lem of economic waste, and are demonstrating by line upon 
line and precept upon precept how the chaos of competition, 
industrial autocracy, and a controlling profit motive are re- 
flected in idle hours, low wages, high prices, and inferior prod- 
ucts. The co-operative movement is slowly providing a new 
and more efficient machinery of distribution, while co-operative 
banks are building up a reserve of credit for those who wish 
to experiment with undertakings conducted for other purposes 
than the profit of the proprietor. Such functional use of the 
labour movement is more dangerous to the existing disorder 
than volumes of phrases or a whole battalion of " natural 
rights." 

Extremists call such activities compromise. They are com- 
promise in the sense that any hypothesis must be changed to 
fit the facts, but they involve no compromise with scientific 
truth. The alchemist compromised when he gave up the 
search for the philosopher's stone and began to learn from the 
elements. He surrendered a sterile dogma for a fruitful sci- 
ence. In proportion as radicals learn how to put their emo- 
tions to work, in proportion as they devise ways to function 
in the world in which we live, will they make possible not only 
unity among themselves, but a rapprochement with other 
Americans. A man who believes there is no real possibility 
of change short of complete revolution can unite with a man 
who has no theory about the matter at all so long as they do 
not discuss abstract doctrine, but concentrate upon the prob- 
lem of how to bring about a particular effect at a particular 
time. The most radical theories, if expressed in terms of con- 
crete situations, will be accepted by those who are wary of 
generalities, or do not understand them. The theories will be 
tested in the fact. The operation of such a process may be 
blocked by those who dogmatically oppose all experiment, but 
in that case the forces of reason and of nature will be so clearly 
on the side of the radical that there can be no doubt about 
his ultimate fruitfulness. 

George Soule 



THE SMALL TOWN 

AMERICA is a nation of villagers, once remarked George 
Bernard Shaw in a moment of his most exclusive scorn 
for what he believed was our crude and naive susceptibility to 
the modes and moods, to say nothing of the manners, of the 
professional patriots during that hectic period when Wilhelm 
was training to become the woodman of Amerongen. Now 
Shaw is the oracle of the Occident, and when he speaks there 
is no docile dog this side of Adelphi Terrace presumptuous 
enough to bark. At least there should not be; and in any 
event, neither history nor H. G. Wells records any spirited 
protest on America's part to the Shavian accusation. It was 
allowed to stand invulnerable and irrefutable. Of course, in 
our hearts we know Shaw is right. We may for the moment 
be signifying rus in urbe, but between you and me and the 
chief copy-reader of the Marion (Ohio) Star, in urbe is a super- 
fluous detail. 

Show me a native New Yorker and I will show you some- 
thing as extinct as a bar-tender. There are no native New 
Yorkers. All New Yorkers come from small towns and farms. 
Ask Dad, ask the Sunday editor, ask the census-taker — they 
know. And what is true of New York is true of Boston and 
Chicago. The big men, the notable men of the big cities, hail 
from the small towns, the Springfields, the Jacksons, the James- 
towns, Georgetowns, Charlestowns — yes, and from the Eliza- 
beths and Charlottes — of the nation. 

Under the circumstances any back-to-the-land movement in 
this country seems futile if not ridiculous. The land is still 
confident and capable of taking care of itself. It needs no aid 
from the city chaps and asks none. The Freudians are not 
deceived for a moment over the basis of a return-to-the-farm 
enterprise. They recognize it for what it is — a sentimental 
complex superinduced by the nervous hysteria of the city. But 
even the amazingly small proportion of the population that is 

285 



2 86 CIVILIZATION 

not Freudian refuses to become influenced by the cry of the 
sentimentalists. Because it is keenly, though unpretentiously, 
aware of the genuinely rural state of its culture and civiliza- 
tion. 

The civilization of America is predominantly the civihzation 
of the small town. The few libertarians and cosmopolites who 
continue to profess to see a broader culture developing along 
the Atlantic seaboard resent this fact, though they scarcely 
deny it. They are too intelligent, too widened in vision to 
deny it. They cannot watch the tremendous growth and 
power and influence of secret societies, of chambers of com- 
merce, of boosters' clubs, of the Ford car, of moving pictures, 
of talking-machines, of evangelists, of nerve tonics, of the Sat- 
urday Evening Post, of Browning societies, of circuses, of 
church socials, of parades and pageants of every kind and 
description, of family reunions, of pioneer picnics, of county 
fairs, of firemen's conventions without secretly acknowledging 
it. And they know, if they have obtained a true perspective 
of America, that there is no section of this vast political unit 
that does not possess — and even frequently boast — these un- 
mistakably provincial signs and symbols. 

I do not mean to imply that such aspects make America an 
unfit place in which to live. On the contrary, America's very 
possession of them brings colour and rugged picturesqueness, 
if not a little pathos, to the individual with imagination suffi- 
cient to find them. Mr. Dreiser found them and shed a trium- 
phant tear, " Dear, crude America " is to him a sweet and 
melancholy reality. It is a reality that has been expressed with 
a good deal of prophecy — and some profit — by the young novel- 
ists. Small-town realism with a vengeance, rather than a joy, 
has been the keynote of their remarkable success during the 
past year. However, they pulled the pendulum of cultural life 
too far in one direction. They failed, for the most part, of 
appreciating the similarity of human nature in city as in coun- 
try, with the result that their triumph is ephemeral. Already 
the reaction has set in. There are now going on in the work- 
rooms of the novelists attempts to immortalize Riverside Drive, 
Fifth Avenue, Beacon Street, Michigan Boulevard, and Penn- 
sylvania Avenue. 



THE SMALL TOWN 287 

Unless they penetrate into the soul of these avenues, un- 
less they perceive that these avenues are not spiritually differ- 
ent from Main Street, though they may be clothed in the 
habiliments of metropolitan taste and fancy, they will fail to 
symbolize correctly America. They will be writing merely for 
money and controversial space in the literary supplements. 

For the soul of these avenues is a soul with an i substi- 
tuted for u. It is the soul of the land. It is a homely, whole- 
some provincialism, typifying human nature as it is found 
throughout the United States. We may herd in a large centre 
of population, assume the superficialities of cosmopolitan cul- 
ture and genuinely believe ourselves devils of fellows. It takes 
all the force of a prohibition law to make us realize that we are 
more sinned against than sinning. Then are we confronted 
sharply by the fact that the herd is appallingly inefficient and 
inarticulate in a conflict with isolated individualism. 

The prohibition movement originated in farming communi- 
ties and villages where the evils of alcohol are ridiculously in- 
significant. No self-respecting or neighbour-respecting villager 
could afford to be known as a drinking man. His business or 
his livelihood was at stake. Then why did he foster prohi- 
bition? Why did he seek to fasten it upon the city resident 
who, if he drank, did not lose apparently his own or his neigh- 
bour's respect? Chiefly because of his very isolation. Because 
he was geographically deprived of the enjoyments which the 
city man shared. I can well imagine a farmer in the long 
sweating hours of harvest time or a small town storekeeper 
forced to currying favour with his friends and neighbours 365 
days in a year, resolutely declaring that what he cannot have 
the man in the city shall not have. The hatching of all kinds 
of prohibitory plots can be traced to just such apparent injus- 
tices of life. Dr. Freud would correctly explain it under the 
heading of inferiority-complex. 

City men have marvelled at the remarkable organization of 
the reformers. It is not so much organization, however, as it 
is a national feeling perceived and expressed simultaneously. 
Cities may conduct the most efficient propaganda against such 
a feeling, they may assemble their largest voting strength to 
assail it. All in vain. The country districts roll up the 



288 CIVILIZATION 

majorities and the cities are left unmistakably high and dry. 

So it is with most of the laws and movements of America. 
The rural sections have but to will them and they become 
in due time established facts. An idea merely has to take 
root in the mind of some socially oppressed individual. He 
talks it over with his friends at lodge meeting or during an 
informal hour at a board of trade meeting. He receives en- 
couragement. He imparts the idea to his wife, who carries it 
to her literary club, where it is given further airing. It spreads 
to the volunteer firemen's clubrooms, to the grange picnics 
and the church socials. It is discussed in the pulpits. Finally 
it reaches the ears of the village and county politicians who, 
impressed by its appeal to the moral force of the community, 
decide after hours in the back room of the post-office or the 
national bank to interest the congressman or assemblyman 
from their district in its merits as a possible law upon the 
statute books. The congressman and assemblyman, acutely 
aware of the side on which their bread is buttered, agree to do 
" everything within their power " to put the measure through. 
Having the assistance of other congressmen and assemblymen, 
most of whom are from rural districts, their tasks assuredly 
are not difficult. 

Before tirie appearance of the automobile and the movie 
upon the national horizon, the small town was chiefly charac- 
terized by a distinctly rural and often melancholy peacefulness. 
A gentle air of depression hung over it, destructive of the am- 
bitious spirit of youth and yet, by very reason of its existence, 
influencing this spirit to seek adventure and livelihood in wider 
fields. Amusements were few and far between. It was the day 
of the quilting party, of the Sunday promenade in the ceme- 
tery, of buggy-riding, of the ice-cream festival and the spelling 
bee. The bucolic note was ever present. 

Such an environment, while joyous to the small boy, became 
hopelessly dull and lifeless to the youth of vitality and imagina- 
tion. Restlessness with it tormented him day and night until 
it grew into an obsession. Especially did he dislike Sunday, 
its funereal quiet with stores closed and other possible avenues 
of excitement and adventure forbidden. He began to cherish 
dreams of a life strange and teeming in distant cities. 



THE SMALL TOWN 289 

As he grew older and a measure of independence came to 
him he fled, provided there was no business established by a 
patient and hard-working ancestry which might lure him into 
remaining home. And even that did not always attract him. 
He was compelled to go by his very nature — a nature that de- 
sired a change from the pall of confining and circumscribed 
realism, the masks of respectability everywhere about him, the 
ridiculous display of caste, that saw a rainbow of fulfilled ideals 
over the hills, that demanded, in a word, romance. 

He, who did not feel this urge, departed because of lack of 
business opportunities. Occasionally he returned disillusioned 
and exhausted by the city and eager to re-establish himself in 
a line of work which promised spiritual contentment. But 
more often he stayed away, struggling with the crowd in the 
city, returning home only for short vacation periods for rest 
and reminiscence, to see his people and renew boyhood friend- 
ships. At such times he was likely to be impressed by the 
seeming prosperity of those boys he left behind, of the appar- 
ent enjoyment they found in the narrow environment. The 
thought may have occurred to him that the life of the small 
town had undergone a marked change, that it had adopted 
awkward, self-conscious urban airs. 

Suddenly he realizes that the automobile and the movie 
and to some extent the topical magazine are mainly responsible 
for the contrast. The motor-car has given the small town 
man an ever-increasing contact with the city, with life at for- 
merly inaccessible resorts, with the country at large. And the 
movie and the magazine have brought him news and pictures 
of the outside world. He has patronized them and grown 
wiser. 

The basis, the underlying motive, of all cultural life in the 
small town is social. The intellectual never enters. It may 
try to get in but the doors are usually barred. There is 
practically no demand for the so-called intellectual magazines. 
Therefore, they are seldom placed on sale. But few daily 
papers outside of a radius of fifty miles are read. Plays which 
have exclusive appeal to the imagination or the intellect are 
presented to rows of empty seats. On the other hand, dramas 
teeming with primitive emotions and the familiar devices of 



290 CIVILIZATION 

hokum attract large audiences^ provided the producing man- 
agers care to abide by the present excessive transportation 
rates. There is but little interest manifested in great world 
movements, such as the economic upheaval in Eastern Europe. 
Normalcy is, indeed, the watchword so far as intellectual de- 
velopment is concerned. 

It is in the social atmosphere that the American village has 
its real raison d'etre. Therein do we meet the characteristics 
that have stamped themselves indelibly upon American life. 
The thousand and one secret societies that flourish here have 
particularly fertile soil in the small towns. Count all the loyal 
legionaries of all the chapters of all the secret societies between 
the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and you have a job suited only 
to the most irrepressible statistician. And the most loyal live 
in the small towns and villages of the United States. The 
choice is not limited. There are societies enough to suit all 
kinds of personalities and purses. 

The Knights of Pythias, the Knights of the Maccabees, the 
Odd Fellows, the Elks, the Eagles, the Loyal Order of the 
Moose, the Modern Woodmen, the Masons with their elabo- 
rate subdivisions of Shriners and Knights Templar — all count 
their membership throughout the nation. And the women, 
jealous of their husbands' loyalty to various and complex forms 
of hocus-pocus, have organized auxiliary societies which, while 
not maintaining the secrecy that veils the fraternal orders, 
nevertheless build up a pretentious mystery intriguing to the 
male mind. 

No town is a self-respecting town unless it can boast half 
a dozen of these societies. They are the fabric of which the 
basis of the social structure is built. They are the very essence 
of America. They dot the national landscape. Every city, as 
if to prove conclusively its provincial nature, displays one or 
more temples devoted to the rituals of fraternal organiza- 
tion. 

Recently the South has revived the order of the Ku Klux 
Klan which flourished after the Civil War as a means of im- 
proving upon the orderly course of the law in dealing with the 
Negro race. Here is the apotheosis of the secret society, with 
its magnificent concealment of identity in a unique form of 



THE SMALL TOWN 291 

dress, its pretensions to 100 per cent. Americanism, its blatant 
proclamations of perpetuating the great and glorious traditions 
of the republic. The Negro has already organized to offset 
this propaganda. He knew that unless he could show secret 
orders of imposing strength he had no right even to the ques- 
tionable heritage of habitation here. He would be outside the 
spirit of the times. He owed it to America, to " dear, crude 
America," to organize lodges and secret societies; and he has 
done so. 

Undoubtedly the secret society plays a large part in the 
greatness of America. It has made the American class- 
conscious. It has made him recognize his own importance, his 
own right to the national distinction of good-fellowship. It 
provides him temporary surcease from domestic and business 
details, though there are countless numbers of men who join 
these orders to make business details, so far as they affect 
them, more significant. 

The amazing prevalence of conventions in America is an 
outgrowth of the secret societies. Life to many 100 per cent. 
Americans is just one lodge convention after another. Held 
in a different city each year, a distinction that is industriously 
competed for, the convention has become a fixed fact in Ameri- 
can cultural life. Here is the one occasion of the year when 
the serious diddle-daddle is laid aside, and refuge and freedom 
are sought in such amusements as the convention city can 
offer. The secret order convention has inspired the assembly 
of all kinds and descriptions of conventions — trade conven- 
tions, religious conventions, educational conventions — until 
there is no city in the land boasting a first-class hotel that does 
not at one time or another during the year house delegates with 
elaborate insignia and badges. 

Probably the first parade held in America was that of a 
class-conscious fraternal organization eager to display its high 
standard of membership as well as a unique resplendence in 
elaborate regalia. The parade has continued an integral part 
of American life ever since. There is something of the vigour, 
the gusto and crudeness of America in a parade. It has come 
to represent life here in all its curious phases. 

The parade had become an event of colourful significance 



292 CIVILIZATION 

when P. T. Barnum organized the " greatest show on earth." 
He decided to glorify it — in his dictionary " to glorify " really 
meant " to commercialize " — and once and for all time asso- 
ciate it chiefly with the circus. He succeeded, mainly because 
the residents of the villages were receptive to the idea. They 
saw a bizarre relief from the monotony of existence. The 
farmers rolled down from the hills in their lumber-wagons 
and found an inarticulate joy, storekeepers closed shop and 
experienced a tumultuous freedom from the petty bickerings 
of trade, men and women renewed their youth, children were 
suddenly thrown into a very ecstasy of delight. Thus, the 
circus parade became part and parcel of American civihzation. 

And the precious and unique spirit created by the circus 
parade has been carried on in innumerable representations. 
To-day America shelters parades of every conceivable enter- 
prise. Firemen have a day in every small town of the land on 
which they joyously pull flower-laden hose-carts for the enter- 
tainment of their fellow-citizens. Bearing such labels as 
Alerts, Rescues and Champion Hook and Ladder No. i, they 
march proudly down Main Street — and the world goes hang. 
The volunteer firemen's organization is an institution peculiar 
to the American small town, — an institution, too, that is not 
without class-consciousness. The rough-and-ready, compara- 
tively illiterate young men form one group. The clerks, men 
engaged in the professions and social favourites compose an- 
other. This class is usually endowed by the wealthiest resident 
of the town, and its gratitude is expressed usually by naming 
the organization for the local Croesus. 

The Elks parade, the Knights of Pythias parade, veterans 
of various wars parade, the Shriners and Knights Templar 
parade, prohibitionists parade, anti-prohibitionists parade, poli- 
ticians parade, women parade, babies parade — everybody 
parades in America. Indeed, America can be divided into 
two classes, those who parade and those who watch the parade. 
The parade is indelibly identified with the small town. It is 
also inalienably associated with the large city, composed, as it 
is, of small-town men. 

There has lately taken place in the villages throughout 
the country a new movement that has civic pride as its basis. 



THE SMALL TOWN 293 

It is the formation of boosters' clubs. Everybody is boost- 
ing his home town, at least publicly, though in the privacy 
of the front porch he may be justly depressed by its narrow- 
ness of opportunity, its subservience to social snobbery, its 
intellectual aridity. " Come to Our Town. Free Sites Fur- 
nished for Factories," read the signs along the railroad tracks. 
" Boost Our Town " shout banners stretched across Main 
Street. 

Is there not something vitally poignant in such a proud pro- 
vincialism? Is not America endeavouring to lift itself up by 
its boot-straps, to make life more comfortable and interesting? 
The groping, though crude, is commendable. It is badly di- 
rected because there is no inspiration back of it, because its 
organizers are only remotely aware how to make life here more 
interesting. However, there is the effort and it is welcome. 

Perhaps, when the towns — and for that matter the cities — 
realize that artistic sensitiveness is necessary to achieve com- 
fort and interest we shall have boosters who are as enthusiastic 
on the front porch as in the board of trade meeting. When 
will our towns take artistic advantage of their river-fronts? 
The place for the most beautiful walk and drive and park pre- 
sents usually unsightly piers, factories and sheds. Railroad 
tracks are often laid in the very heart of the town. For many 
years the leading hotels in practically all of our towns and 
cities were built in close proximity to the railroad station. In 
seeking to save a traveller time and convenience hotel pro- 
prietors subjected him to the bodily and mental discomforts 
that are related to the vicinity of a railroad station. Of late 
there is a marked tendency to erect hotels in quiet residential 
streets away from the noise and confusion of shops and rail- 
road yards. 

The billboard menace, while diminishing, is still imposing. 
It is to the everlasting shame of the towns and cities that in 
an era of prohibitions no legislative effort has been made to 
stop the evil of desecrating our finest streets with advertising 
signs. Such commercial greed is inconceivable to the foreign 
visitor. It is one of his first impressions, though he charitably 
takes refuge in public in attributing it to the high tension of 
our existence. 



294 CIVILIZATION 

While the first symptoms of artistic appreciation are begin- 
ning to be faintly discerned upon the American horizon, the 
old and familiar phases of social life in the country are still 
being observed. The picnic of first settlers, the family reunion, 
the church supper, the sewing circle, the Browning society- 
all have national expression. The introduction of such mod- 
ern industrial devices as the automobile has not affected them 
in the least. It can truly be asserted that the flivver has even 
added to their popularity. It has brought people of the coun- 
try districts into closer contact than ever before. It has given 
a new prestige to the picnics and the reunions. 

What offers more rustic charm and simplicity than a fam- 
ily reunion? Practically every family in the farming districts 
that claims an ancestral residence in this country of more than 
fifty years holds one annually. It is attended by the great 
and the near-great from the cities, by the unaffected relatives 
back home. Babies jostle great-grandparents. Large and 
perspiring women bake for days the cakes and pies to be con- 
sumed. The men of the house are foolishly helping in making 
the rooms and the front lawn ready. At last the reunion is 
at hand — a sentimental debauch, a grand gorging. Everybody 
present feels the poignancy of age. But while the heart throbs 
the stomach is working overtime. The law of compensation is 
satisfied. " A good time was had by all " finds another ex- 
pression in the weekly paper, and the reunion becomes a 
memory. 

At pioneer picnics one finds the family reunion on a larger 
scale. The whole township and county has for the time be- 
come related. It is the day of days, a sentimental tourna- 
ment with handshaking as the most popular pastime. Organ- 
ized in the rugged primitiveness of the early part of the 19th 
century by men who were first to settle in the vicinity, the 
pioneer picnic has been perpetuated, until to-day it is linked 
inalterably with America's development. It has weathered 
the passing of the nation from an agricultural to a great indus- 
trial commonwealth. It has stood the gaff of time. And so 
it goes on for ever, a tradition of the small town and the farm- 
ing community. While it has been divested almost entirely 
of its original purpose, it serves to bring the politicians in touch 



THE SMALL TOWN 295 

with the "peepul." Grandiloquent promises are made for a 
day from the rostrum by a battalion of " Honourables " — and 
forgotten both by the " Honourables " and the public intent 
upon dancing and walking aimlessly about the grounds. The 
pohticians smile as they continue to preserve their heroic pose, 
and the " peepul," satisfied that all is well with the world, turn 
to various gambling devices that operate under the hypocritical 
eye of the sheriff and to the strange dances that have crept 
up from the jungle, for it is a day filled with the eternal spirit 
of youth. There is ingenuous appeal in the fair samples of 
the yokelry present. There is a quiet force beneath the bovine 
expressions of the boys. The soul of America — an America 
glad to be alive — is being wonderfully and pathetically mani- 
fested. No shams, no superficialities, no self-conscious sophis- 
tication are met. Merely the sturdy quality of the true Ameri- 
can civilization, picturesque and haunting in its primitive- 
ness. 

The county fair belongs in the same classification as the first- 
settler picnic. It is the annual relaxation by farmers and 
merchants from the tedious tasks of seeing and talking to the 
same people day after day. It offers them a measure of 
equality with the people in the city with their excursion boats, 
their baseball games, their park sports. And they make the 
most of their opportunity. They come to see and to be seen, 
to risk a few dollars on a horse race, to admire the free exhibi- 
tions in front of the side-shows, to watch with wide eyes the 
acrobatic stunts before the grandstand, to hear the " Poet and 
the Peasant " overture by the band, proud and serious in a 
stand of its own. 

Three or four days given to such pleasures naturally bestow 
a fine sense of illusion upon the visitors. They begin to be- 
lieve that life has been specially ordered for them. They see 
through a glass lightly. They care not a whiff about the 
crowded excitements of the city. They have something infi- 
nitely more enjoyable than a professional baseball game or an 
excursion ride down the river. They have days of endless 
variety, of new adventures, of new thoughts. They, too, know 
that America cannot go wrong so long as they continue to find 
illusion. And they are correct. They may not suspect that 



296 CIVILIZATION 

American culture is crude. They do know, however, that it 
is dear. They should worry. 

Against such a background have the flavour and essence 
of American life been compounded. Their influence has ex- 
tended in all directions, in all walks of industry. They have 
left their impress upon the character of the country, upon the 
mob and the individual. Sentimental attachment to the old 
ties, to boyhood ideals and traditions remains potent though 
a little concealed by the mask, be it affected or real, of sophis- 
tication. It is the voice of a new land, of a vigorous and curi- 
ous nationalism that is being exerted. There obviously cannot 
be among such a naturally healthy people a supercilious con- 
tempt for sentiment. We may laugh a little haughtily at the 
amazing susceptibility of folks to the extravagant eloquence 
of itinerant evangelists. We may look on an " old home 
week " with a touch of urban disdain. We may listen to the 
band concert on a Saturday night in the Court House Square 
with a studied indifference. We may assume an attractive 
weariness in watching the promenaders on Main Street visit 
one ice-cream emporium after another. But deep down in our 
hearts is a feeling of invincible pride in the charming homeli- 
ness, the youthful vitality, the fine simplicity, yes, and the 
sweeping pathos of these aspects of small-town civilization. 

Louis Raymond Reid 



HISTORY 

" Nescire autem quid antea quam natus sis 
acciderit id est semper puerum esse." 

Cicero. 

"History is bunk." 

Henry Ford 

THE burghers of Holland, being (like the Chinese) inclined 
towards a certain conservatism of both manners and 
habits, continued the tradition of the " front parlour " — 
the so-called " good-room " — well into the 20th century. 
Every farmer had his " front parlour " filled with stuffy air, 
stuffy furniture, and an engraving of the Eiffel Tower facing 
the lithographic representation of a lady in mid-seas clinging 
desperately to a somewhat ramshackle granite cross. 

But the custom was not restricted to the bucolic districts. 
His late Majesty, William III (whose funeral was the most 
useful event of his long Hfe), had been married to an estimable 
lady of Victorian proclivities, who loved a " tidy " and an 
" antimacassar " better than life itself. An aristocracy, re- 
cruited from the descendants of East India Directors and West 
India sugar planters, followed the Royal Example. They 
owned modest homes which the more imaginative Latin would 
have called " Palazzi." Most of the ground floor was taken 
up by an immense " front parlour." For the greater part of 
the year it was kept under lock and key while the family clus- 
tered around the oil lamp of the " back parlour " where they 
lived in the happy cacophony of young daughters practising 
Czerny and young sons trying to master the intricacies of 
" paideuo — paideueis — paideuei." 

As for the " front parlour " (which will form the main part 
of my text), it was opened once or twice a twelve-month for 
high family functions. A week beforehand, the cleaning 
woman (who received six cents per hour in those blessed 

297 



298 CIVILIZATION 

Neanderthal days) would arrive with many mops and many 
brooms. The covers would be removed from the antique fur- 
niture^ the frames of the pictures would be duly scrubbed. The 
carpets were submitted to a process which resembled indoor 
ploughing and for fully half an hour each afternoon the win- 
dows were opened to the extent of three or four inches. 

Then came the day of the reception — the birthday party of 
the grandfather — the betrothal of the young daughter. All 
the relatives were there in their best silks and satins. The 
guests were there in ditto. There was light and there was 
music. There was enough food and drink to keep an entire 
Chinese province from starving. Yet the party was a failure. 
The old family portraits — excellent pieces by Rembrandt or 
Terborch — looked down upon grandchildren whom they did 
not know. The grandchildren, on the other hand, were quite 
uncomfortable in the presence of this past glory. Sometimes, 
when the guests had expressed a sincere admiration of these 
works of art, they hired a hungry Ph.D. to write a critical essay 
upon their collection for the benefit of the " Studio " or the 
" Connoisseur." Then they ordered a hundred copies, which 
they sent to their friends that they might admire (and per- 
haps envy) the ancient lineage of their neighbours. There- 
after, darkness and denim covers and oblivion. 

The history of our great Republic suffers from a fate sim- 
ilar to that of these heirlooms. It lives in the " front parlour " 
of the national consciousness. It is brought out upon a few 
grand occasions when it merely adds to the general discomfort 
of the assisting multitude. For the rest of the time it lies 
forgotten in the half dark of those Washington cellars which 
for lack of National Archives serve as a receptacle for the 
written record of our past. 

Our popular estimate of history and the value of a general 
historical background was defined a few years ago by Henry 
Ford. Mr. Ford, having made a dozen flivvers go where none 
went before and having gained untold wealth out of the motor- 
car industry, had been appointed an ex-officio and highly es- 
teemed member of our national Council of Wise Men. His 
opinion was eagerly asked upon such subjects as child-raising, 
irrigation, the future of the human race, and the plausibility 



HISTORY 299 

of the Einstein theory. During a now memorable trial the 
subject of history came up for discussion, and Mr. Ford (if 
we are to believe the newspaper accounts) delivered himself 
of the heartfelt sentiment that " history is bunk." A grate- 
ful country sang Amen! 

When asked to elucidate this regrettable expression of dis- 
like, the average citizen will fall back upon reminiscences of 
his early childhood and in terms both contrite and unflattering 
he will thereupon describe the hours of misery which he has 
spent reciting " dreary facts about useless kings," winding up 
with a wholesale denunciation of American history as some- 
thing dull beyond words. 

We cannot say much in favour of late Stuarts, Romanoffs, 
and Wasa's, but we confess to a sincere affection for the his- 
tory of these United States. It is true there are few women 
in it and no little children. This, to us, seems an advantage. 
" Famous women of history " usually meant " infamous trou- 
ble " for their much perturbed contemporaries. As for the 
ever-popular children motif, the little princes of the Tower 
would have given a great deal had they been allowed to white- 
wash part of Tom Sawyer's famous fence, instead of waiting in 
silken splendour for Uncle Richard's murder squad. 

No, the trouble is not with the history of this land of end- 
less plains and a limitless sky. The difficulty lies with the 
reader. He is the victim of an unfortunate circumstance. 
The Muses did not reach these shores in the first-class cabin of 
the Aquitania. They were almost held up at Ellis Island and 
deported because they did not have the necessary fifty dollars. 
They were allowed to sneak in after they had given a solemn 
promise that they would try to become self-supporting and 
would turn their white hands to something useful. 

Clio, our revered mistress, has tried hard to live up to this 
vow. But she simply is not that sort of woman. An excellent 
counsellor, the most charming and trusted of friends, she has 
absolutely no gift for the practical sides of life. She was 
forced to open a little gift-shop where she sold flags and bunt- 
ing and pictures of Pocahontas and Paul Revere. The venture 
was not a success. A few people took pity on her and tried 
to help. She was asked to recite poetry at patriotic gatherings 



300 CIVILIZATION 

and do selections from the " Founding Fathers." She did not 
like this, being a person of shy and unassuming character. And 
so she is back in the little shop. When last I saw her, she was 
trying to learn the Russian alphabet. That is always a dan- 
gerous sign. 

And now, lest we continue to jumble our metaphors, let us 
state the case with no more prejudice than is strictly necessary. 

The earliest settlers of this country brought their history 
with them. Little Snorri, son of Gudrid and Thorfinn Karlsefni, 
playing amidst the vines of his father's Labradorian garden, 
undoubtedly listened to the selfsame sagas that were being 
told at the court of good King Olaf Tryggvason in distant 
Norway. The children of San Domingo shared the glories of 
the Cid with the boys and girls who visited the schools of 
Moukkadir's ancient capital. And the long-suffering infants 
of the early New England villages merely finished an historical 
education that had begun at Scrooby and had been continued 
at No. 21 of the Kloksteeg in Leyden. 

During the 17th century, the greater part of the Atlantic 
coast became English. The Dutch and the French, the Span- 
ish and Swedish traditions disappeared. The history of the 
British Kingdom became the universal history of the terri- 
tory situated between the thirtieth and the fiftieth degree of 
latitude. Even the American Revolution was a quarrel be- 
tween two conflicting versions of certain identical principles 
of history. Lord North and George Washington had learned 
their lessons from the same text-book. His Lordship, of 
course, never cut the pages that told of Runymede, and George 
undoubtedly covered the printed sheets which told of the fate 
of rebels with strange geometrical figures. But the historical 
inheritance of the men who fought on the left bank of the Fish 
Kill and those who surrendered on the right shore was a com- 
mon one, and Burgoyne and Gates might have spent a profit- 
able evening sharing a bottle of rum and complimenting each 
other upon the glorious deeds of their respective but identical 
ancestors. 

But during the 'twenties and 'thirties of the 19th century, the 
men of the " old regime " — the founder and fighters of the 
young Republic — descended into the grave and they took theii: 



HISTORY 301 

traditions, their hopes, and their beliefs with them. The cur- 
tain rose upon a new time and upon a new people. The ac- 
quisition of the Northwestern Territory in 1787 and the pur- 
chase of Napoleon's American real-estate in the year 1803 had 
changed a little commonwealth of struggling Colonies into a 
vast empire of endless plains and unlimited forests. It was 
necessary to populate this new land. The history of the 
Coast came to an end. The history of the Frontier began. 
English traditions rarely crossed the Alleghanies. The long 
struggle for representative government took on a new aspect in 
a land where no king had ever set foot and where man was 
sovereign by the good right of his own energy. 

It is true that the first fifty years of the last century wit- 
nessed the arrival upon these shores of millions of men and 
women from Europe who had enjoyed a grammar school edu- 
cation in the land of their birth. But dukes do not emigrate. 
Those sturdy fellows who risked the terrors and horrors of the 
Atlantic in the leaky tubs of the early forties came to the 
country of their future that they might forget the nightmare 
of the past. That nightmare included the biography of Might 
which was then the main feature of the European text-book. 
They threw it overboard as soon as they were well outside of 
the mouth of the Elbe or the Mersey. Settled upon the farms 
of Michigan and Wisconsin, they sometimes taught their chil- 
dren the songs of the old Fatherland but its history never. 
After two generations, this migration — the greatest of all 
" treks " since the 4th century — came to an end. Roads had 
been made, canals had been dug, railroads had been con- 
structed, forests had been turned into pastures, the Indian was 
gone, the buffalo was gone, free land was gone, cities had been 
built, and the scene had been made ready for the final 
apotheosis of all human accomplishment — civilization. 

The schoolmaster has ever followed in the wake of the full 
dinner-pail. He now made his appearance and began to teach. 
Considering the circumstances he did remarkably well. But 
he too worked under a disadvantage. He was obliged to go 
to New England for his learning and for his text-books. And 
the historian of the Boston school, while industrious and pa- 
tient, was not entirely a fair witness. The recollection of 



302 CIVILIZATION 

British red-coats drilling on the Common was still fresh in 
the minds of many good citizens. The wickedness of George 
III was more than a myth to those good men and women whose 
own fathers had watched Major Pitcairn as he marched forth 
to arrest Adams and Hancock. They sincerely hated their 
former rulers, while they could not deny their love for the old 
mother country. Hence there arose a conflict of grave conse- 
quence. With one hand the New England chronicler twisted 
the tail of the British lion. With the other he fed the creature 
little bits of sugar. 

Again the scene changed. The little red school-house had 
marched across the plains. It had followed the pioneer through 
the passes of the Rocky Mountains. It had reached the shores 
of the Pacific Ocean. The time of hacking and building and 
frying with lard came to a definite end. The little red school- 
house gave way for the academy of learning. College and Uni- 
versity arose wherever a thousand people happened to be to- 
gether. History became a part of the curriculum. The school- 
master, jack of all learned trades and master of many prac- 
tical pursuits, became extinct. The professional historian made 
his appearance. And thereby hangs a sad tale which takes us 
to the barren banks of the Spree. 

Ever since the Thirty Years War, Germany had been the 
battlefield of Europe, The ambitions of the Napoleon who 
was four feet tall and smooth shaven and the prospective am- 
bitions of the Napoleon who was five feet tall and who waxed 
his moustachios, had given and were actually giving that coun- 
try very little rest. The intelligentsia of the defunct Holy Ro- 
man Empire saw but a single road which could lead to salva- 
tion. The old German State must be re-established and the 
kings of Prussia must become heirs to the traditions of Charle- 
magne. To prove this point it was necessary that the obedient 
subjects of half a hundred little potentates be filled with cer- 
tain definite historical notions about the glorious past of Hein- 
rich the Fat and Konrad the Lean. The patient historical 
camels of the Teutonic universities were driven into the heart 
of Historia Deserta and brought back those stupendous bricks 
of learning out of which the rulers of the land could build their 
monuments to the glorious memory of the Ancestors. 



HISTORY 303 

Whatever their faults and however misguided the ambition 
of these faithful beasts of burden, they knew how to work. 
The whole world looked on with admiration. Here, at last, 
in this country of scientific precision, history had been elevated 
to the rank of a " Wissenschajt." Carrying high their banners, 
" For God, for Country, und wie es eigentlich dagewesen," all 
good historians went upon a crusade to save the Holy Land of 
the Past from the Ignorance of the Present. 

That was in the blessed days when a first-class passage to 
Hamburg and Bremen cost forty-six dollars and seventy-five 
cents. Henry Adams and John Lothrop Motley were among 
the first of the pilgrims. They drank a good deal of beer, lis- 
ened to many excellent concerts, and assisted, " privatissime 
and gratis," at the colloquia docta of many highly learned Ge- 
heimrdte, and departed before they had suffered serious dam- 
age. Others did not fare as well. Three — four — five years they 
spent in the company of the Carolingians and the Hohenstau- 
fens. After they had soaked themselves sufficiently in Ploetz 
and Bernheim to survive the Examen Rigorosum of the Hoch- 
gelehrte Facultdt, they returned to their native shore to spread 
the gospel of true Wlssenschajtlichkeit. 

There was nothing typically American in this. It happened 
to the students of every country of the globe. 

Of course, in making this point, we feel that we expose our- 
selves to the accusation of a slight exaggeration. " How now," 
the industrious reader exclaims, " would you advocate a return 
to the uncritical days of the Middle Ages? " To which we 
answer, " By no means." But history, like cooking or fiddling, 
is primarily an art. It embellishes life. It broadens our tol- 
erance. It makes us patient of bores and fools. It is without 
the slightest utilitarian value. A handbook of chemistry or 
higher mathematics has a right to be dull. A history, never. 
And the professional product of the Teutonic school resembled 
those later-day divines who tried to console the dying by a 
recital of the Hebrew verb abhar. 

This system of preaching the gospel of the past filled the 
pulpits but it emptied the pews. The congregation went else- 
where for its historical enlightenment. Those who were seri- 
ously interested turned to the works of a few laymen (hard- 



304 CIVILIZATION 

ware manufacturers, diplomats, coal-dealers, engineers) who 
devoted their leisure hours to the writing of history, or im- 
ported the necessary intellectual pabulum from abroad. Others 
took to the movies and since those temples of democratic de- 
light do not open before the hour of noon, they spent the early 
morning perusing the endless volumes of reminiscences, me- 
moirs, intimate biographies, and recollections which flood the 
land with the energy of an intellectual cloaca maxima. 

But all this, let us state it once more, did not matter very 
much. When all is peace and happiness — when the hospitals 
are empty of patients — when the weather is fine and people are 
dying at the usual rate — it matters little whether the world at 
large takes a deep interest in the work of the Board of Health. 
The public knows that somewhere, somehow, someway, there 
exists a Board of Health composed of highly trained medical 
experts. They also appreciate from past experiences that these 
watchful gentlemen " know their job " and that no ordinary 
microbe can hope to move from Warsaw to Chicago without 
prompt interference on the part of the debusing squad. But 
when an epidemic threatens the safety of the community, then 
the public hastens to the nearest telephone booth — calls up the 
Health Commissioners and follows their instructions with im- 
plicit faith. It demands that these public servants shall spend 
the days of undisturbed health to prepare for the hour of sick- 
ness when there is no time for meditation and experiment. 

The public at large had a right to expect a similar service 
from its historians. But unfortunately, when the crisis came, 
the scientific historical machine collapsed completely. 

In Germany, the home country of the system of historische 
Wissenschajtlichkeit, the historian became the barker outside 
the Hohenzollern main tent, shouting himself hoarse for the 
benefit of half-hearted fellow citizens and hostile neutrals, ex- 
tolling the ancestral Teutonic virtues until the whole world 
turned away in disgust. In France, they arrange those things 
better. Even the most unhealthy mess of nationalistic scraps 
can be turned into a palatable dish by a competent cook of 
the Parisian school. In England, the historian turned propa- 
gandist, and for three years, the surprised citizens of Copen- 
hagen, Bern, and Madrid found their mail boxes cluttered witH 



HISTORY 305 

mysterious bundles of state documents duly stamped, beauti- 
fully illustrated, and presented (as the enclosed card showed) 
with the compliments of Professor So-and-so of Such-and-such 
College, Oxford, England. In Russia, a far-seeing government 
had taken its measures many years before. Those historians 
who had refused to be used as cheval de bataille for the glory 
of the house of Romanoff, were either botanising along the 
banks of the Lena or had long since found a refuge in the uni- 
versities of Sofia and Geneva. I do not know what happened 
in Japan, but I have a suspicion that it was the same thing, 
the entire world over. 

The historian turned apologist. He was as useful as a doc- 
tor who would show a partiality to the native streptococcus on 
the grounds of loyalty to the land of his birth. 

What happened on this side of the ocean after the first three 
years of " peace without victory " had given place to " force 
to the uttermost " is too well known to demand repetition. 
Long before the first American destroyer reached Plymouth, 
the staunch old vessel of history had been spurlos versenkt in 
the mare clausum of the Western hemisphere. Text-books were 
recalled, rehashed, and revamped to suit the needs of the hour. 
Long and most deservedly forgotten treatises were called back 
to life and with the help of publishers' blurbs and reviews by 
members of the self-appointed guardians of national righteous- 
ness they were sent forth to preach the gospel of domestic vir- 
tue. Strange encyclopaedias of current information were con- 
cocted by volunteers from eager faculties. The public mind 
was a blank. For a hundred years the little children had 
learned to dishke history and grown-ups had revaluated this 
indifference into actual hate. This situation had been created 
to maintain on high the principles of scientific historical inves- 
tigation. Let popular interest perish as long as the Truth 
stand firm. But in the hour of need, the guardians of the 
Truth turned gendarmes, the doors of Clio's temple were 
closed, and the public was invited to watch the continuation of 
the performance in the next moving-picture house. At Ver- 
sailles the curtain went down upon the ghastly performance. 

After the first outbreak of applause the enthusiasm waned. 
Who had been responsible for this terrible tragedy? The sup- 



3o6 CIVILIZATION 

posed authors were branded as enemies of mankind. Nations 
tottered and ancient Empires crumbled to dust and were hastily 
carried to the nearest historical scrapheap. The ambitious 
monarch, who for thirty years had masqueraded as a second 
Charlemagne, made his exit amidst properties borrowed from 
the late King Louis Philippe. The gay young leader of the 
Death Head Hussars developed into the amateur bicycle-re- 
pairer of the island of Wieringen. International reputations 
retailed at a price which could only be expressed in Soviet 
rubles and Polish marks and no takers. The saviour of the 
world became the invalid of the White House. But not a 
word was said about those inconspicuous authors of very con- 
spicuous historical works who had been the henchmen of the 
Oberste and Unterste Kriegsherren. They went back to the 
archives to prepare the necessary post-mortem statements. 
These are now being published at a price which fortunately 
keeps them well out of reach of the former soldiers. 

In certain dramas and comedies of an older day it was cus- 
tomary to interrupt the action while the Chorus of moralising 
Villagers reviewed what had gone before and drew the neces- 
sary conclusions. It is time for the " goat-singers " to make 
their appearance. 

" Are you, O Author," so they speak, " quite fair when 
you pronounce these bitter words? Are we not all human — 
too human? Is it reasonable to demand of our historians that 
they shall possess such qualities of detached judgment as have 
not been seen on this earth since the last of the Mighty Gods 
departed from High Olympus? Has a historian no heart? Do 
you expect him to stand by and discuss the virtues of vague 
political questions, when all the world is doing its bit — ^while 
his children are risking their lives for the safety of the com- 
mon land? " 

And when we are approached in this way, we find it difficult 
to answer " no." For we too are an animated compound of 
prejudice and unreasonable preferences and even more un- 
reasoning dislikes, and we do not like to assume the role of 
both judge and jury. 

The evidence, however, gives us no chance to decide other- 
wise. What was done in the heat of battle — ^what was done 



HISTORY 307 

under the stress of great and sincere emotions — what was 
written in the agony of a thousand fears — all that will be for- 
gotten within a few years. But enough will remain to convince 
our grandchildren that the historian was among those most 
guilty of creating that " state of mind " without which modern 
warfare would be an impossibility. 

Here the music of the flutes grows silent. The Chorus steps 
back and the main action of our little play continues. The 
time is " the present " and the problem is " the future." The 
children who are now in the second grade will be called upon 
to bear the burden of a very long period of reconstruction. 
America, their home, has been compared to an exceedingly 
powerful and influential woman who is not very popular but 
who must not be offended on account of her eminent social 
position. The folk who live along our international Main 
Street are not very well disposed towards a neighbour who holds 
all the mortgages and lives in the only house that has managed 
to survive the recent catastrophe. It will not be an easy thing 
to maintain the peace in the neurasthenic community of the 
great post-war period. It has been suggested that the Ten 
Commandments, when rightly applied, may help us through 
the coming difficulties. We beg to suggest that a thorough 
knowledge of the past will prove to be quite as useful as the 
Decalogue. We do not make this statement hastily. Further- 
more, we qualify it by the observation that both History and 
the Decalogue will be only two of a great many other reme- 
dies that will have to be applied if the world is to be set free 
from its present nightmare of poison gas and high-velocity 
shells. But we insist that History be included. And we do 
so upon the statement of a learned and famous colleague who 
passed through a most disastrous war and yet managed to keep 
a cool head. We mean Thucydides. In his foreword to the 
History of the Peloponnesian War he wrote: " The absence of 
romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from 
its interest; but if it be judged by those inquirers who desire 
an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation 
of the future, which in the course of human things, must re- 
semble, if it does not reflect it, I shall be content." 

When we measure out achievements in the light of this an- 



3o8 CIVILIZATION 

cient Greek ideal, we have accomplished very little indeed. An 
enormous amount of work has been done and much of it is 
excellent. The great wilderness of the past has been explored 
with diligent care and the material lies, carefully classified, in 
those literary museums which we call libraries. But the pub- 
lic refuses to go in. No one has ever been able to convince 
the man in the street that time employed upon historical read- 
ing is not merely time wasted. He carries with him certain 
hazy notions about a few names, Caesar and Joan of Arc (since 
the war) and Magna Charta and George Washington and Abra- 
ham Lincoln. He remembers that Paul Revere took a ride, 
but whither and for what purpose he neither knows nor cares 
to investigate. The historical tie which binds him to the past 
and which alone can make him understand his own position in 
relation to the future, is non-existent. Upon special occasions 
the multitude is given the benefit of a grand historical pyrotech- 
nic display, paid for by the local Chamber of Commerce, and 
a few disjointed facts flash by amidst the fine roar of rockets 
and the blaring of a brass band. But this sort of historical 
evangelising has as little value as the slapstick vespers which 
delight the congregation of Billy Sunday's circus tent. 

We live in an age of patent medicines. The short-cut to 
success is the modern pons asinorum which leads to happiness. 
And remedies which are " guaranteed to cure " are advertised 
down the highways and bjrways of our economic and social 
world. But no such cure exists for the sad neglect of an histor- 
ical background. History can never be detached from life. It 
will continue to reflect the current tendencies of our modern 
world until that happy day when we shall discontinue the 
pursuit of a non-essential greatness and devote our energies 
towards the acquisition of those qualities of the spirit without 
which human existence (at its best) resembles the proverbial 
dog-kennel. 

For the coming of that day we must be as patient as Nature. 

Hendrik Willem Van Loon 



SEX 

" The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
Is the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin." 

IN one of the popular plays of last season, a melodrama 
toned up with snatches of satire and farce, the wife was 
portrayed as a beaten dog heeling her master after he has 
crushed her down across the table the better to rowel off her 
nose. Not until the would-be mutilator was finally disposed 
of by an untrammelled Mexican did the woman feel free to go 
to her lover, and even then she took little or no satisfaction in 
the venture. As for the lover, he had to be robbed of his pistol 
by the husband and shot at, and then — the husband out of the 
way — threatened by the bandit with the loss of the woman, be- 
fore he felt free to take her. The two New Englanders were 
made happy in spite of themselves — and in accordance with 
the traditions or conventions of the audience. 

To leave a husband for a lover is in theory un-American, 
unless the husband gives a legal ground for divorce and the 
divorce is secured. In several States cruelty is a legal ground, 
and so the conjugal fidelity of the stage-heroine was perhaps 
overdrawn. But the feeling that she was presumed to share 
with the audience — that the initiative towards freedom in love 
should not come from her — is a characteristic trait of Ameri- 
can morality. If your husband is unrestrainedly a brute or a 
villain, you may leave him, in fact it behooves you to leave 
him, but if he is merely a bore, or perhaps a man you like well 
enough as a friend, but only as a friend, you must stay on 
with him in an intimacy where boredom readily becomes aver- 
sion and mere friendliness, disgust. The fact that you do not 
love a person is no reason at all, in American opinion, for not 
living as if you did. 

This opinion or attitude is explicit in American divorce law. 
In none of the States is divorce granted either by mutual con- 
sent or at the desire, the overt desire, of either person. In 

309 



310 CIVILIZATION 

fact collusion, as mutual consent is called, is accounted a 
reason against granting divorce, and desire for divorce on the 
part of one remains ineffectual until the other has been forced 
into entertaining it. He or she must be given due ground. 
Disinclination to intimacy is not of itself due ground. You 
must express disinclination in a way so disagreeable that he 
or she will want to get rid of you. The law sets a premium 
on being hateful, declares indeed that in this case it is an in- 
dispensable condition to not being miserable. 

The grotesqueness, from either a social or psychological 
point of view, would be too obvious to emphasize, if the impli- 
cations of this attitude towards divorce were not so significant 
of American attitudes at large towards sex — attitudes of re- 
pression or deception. Of deception or camouflage towards 
divorce there is one other conspicuous point I should like to 
note. " Strictness of divorce " is commonly argued to be pro- 
tection of marriage for the sake of children, since brittle mar- 
riage is destructive of the family life. It is safe to say that 
from no contemporary discussion of divorce will this argu- 
ment be omitted ; and it is equally safe to say that the rejoinder 
that divorce laws should therefore discriminate between parents 
and non-parents will, by the opponents of divorce, pass un- 
heeded. That this distinction should be so persistently ig- 
nored is accountable only, it seems to me, on the ground of 
emotional self-deception. What else but a covert emotional 
attitude could make tenable the irrationality, and what else is 
that attitude but that joy in mating is of negligible value, 
that sex emotion, if not a necessary evil, is at any rate a 
negligible good, deserving merely of what surplus of atten- 
tion may be available from the real business of life? Indif- 
ference towards sex emotion is masked by concern for off- 
spring. 

In France^ we may note, this confusion between parenthood 
and mating does not exist. The parental relation in both law 
and custom is highly regulated, much more regulated than 
among English-speaking peoples, but it is unlikely that it would 
be argued in France that mating and parenthood were insep- 
arable concepts. Unlikely, because the French attitude to- 
wards sex differs so radically from the Anglo-Saxon. 



SEX 311 

To the French, as to many of the Continental peoples of 
Europe, sexual interest is normally to be kept stimulated, 
neither covered over nor suppressed. And in this case stimu- 
lation is seen to depend largely upon the factor of interrela- 
tion. Sex-facts are to be related to other facts of life, not 
rigidly or a priori, as in the American view that mating is in- 
separable from parenthood, but fluently and realistically, as 
life itself moves and finds expression. And sex-facts in Euro- 
pean opinion are to be interrelated in a philosophy of sex. 
Failure to make these interrelations, together with the attitude 
of suppression, seem to me to be the outstanding aspects of 
the characteristically American attitude towards sex. 

There is no need in this post-Freudian day of dwelling upon 
the effects of suppression of sex instinct or impulse. Suppres- 
sion leads, we are told, either to sublimation, in which case it 
is diversion, rather than suppression, or it leads to perversion 
or disease. Unfortunately sex-pathology in the United States 
has been given little or no study, statistically. We have no 
statistical data of health or disease in relation to the expression 
or suppression of sex instinct, and no data on the extent or 
the effects of homosexuality or of the direction of the sex im- 
pulses towards self. Opinion therefore becomes merely a mat- 
ter of personal observation and conclusion, observation of in- 
dividuals or small groups. My own conclusion or guess in re- 
gard to perversion in this country is that part of the commonly 
observed spirit of isolation or antagonism between the sexes, 
and part of the spirit of competition between individuals, are 
associated with homosexual or masturbatory tendencies which 
get expressed in varying degrees according to varying circum- 
stances. More particularly the lack of warmth in personal 
intercourse which makes alike for American bad manners and, 
in the more intellectual circles, for cheerlessness and aridity is 
due, I think, to failure of one kind or another in sex relations. 
I mean cultural failure, not merely individual failure. 

May not some such theory of sex failure account also for 
that herd sense which is so familiar a part of Americanism, 
and which is not incompatible with the t3^e of self-seeking 
or pseudo-individualism of which American individualism ap- 
pears to be an expression? It is a tenable h3^othesis that 



312 CIVILIZATION 

sexually isolated individuals become dependent upon the group 
for stimulus, whether of emotion or will, whereas persons in 
normal sex relations, although they may contribute to the group 
or co-operate with it, remain comparatively independent of it, 
finding stimulus in sex and its sublimations. 

If this theory is valid, we may expect to find a compara- 
tively large number of sex failures in those circles which are 
characterized by what Everett Dean Martin has recently 
called crowd behaviour, reform circles intolerant of other 
mindedness and obsessed by belief in the paramountcy of their 
own dogma. 

" Leur print entps sans jeunesse exige des folies, 
Leiir sang brulant leur dicte des propos amers, 
L'emeute est un remhde a la melancolie, 
Et nous aurions la paix si leurs yeux etaient clairs, 
Ou leur jemme jolie." 

Were a set of tests for sex failure or sex fulfilment applied to 
the more outstanding propagandists of this country, likewise, 
of course, for comparative purposes, to an adequate number 
of non-propagandists, the results might be of considerable 
significance. I recommend the undertaking to the National 
Research Council in co-operation with some organization for 
social hygiene. 

Meanwhile in what measure propagandism of various sorts 
may be a perversion of sex or a sublimation remains specula- 
tive; and in applying theory one should be thoroughly aware 
that from the day of Sappho and before to the day of Eliza- 
beth Blackwell and after, even to the Russian Revolution, sex 
failure of one kind or another, the kind considered at the time 
most despicable, has commonly been imputed to persons or 
groups disapproved of on other grounds or reprobated. Some 
sublimation of sex in the United States there must be, of course, 
not only in propaganda movements, but in other expressions 
of American culture, in American art and letters and science, 
in philanthropy, in politics, finance, and business. By and 
large, however, in all these cultural expressions does one see 
any conspicuous measure of sex sublimation? Is not the con- 
cern practical rather than devotional, a matter of getting 



SEX 313 

rather than giving, of self-advancement or family support 
rather than of interest in ideas and their forms or in the values 
of taste or of faith? 

Interest in impersonal subjects in general is not an Ameri- 
can trait. Personal concrete terms are the terms commonly 
used. Americans, as we say, are not given to abstract thought 
or philosophy. They are interested in facts as facts, not as 
related to other facts. How expect of Americans, therefore, 
that kind of curiosity about sex which leads to a philosophy of 
sex? Sex curiosity in American life does not lead past curiosity 
about isolated facts, and that means that it leads not to philos- 
ophy but to gossip and pruriency. Not long ago I was talking 
with a woman about a common acquaintance to whom I re- 
ferred as singularly free through sophistication and circum- 
stance to please any man she liked. " What do you mean? 
Have you heard any scandal about her? " snapped out my 
companion, not at all interested in the general reflection, but 
avid of information about illicit affairs. 

Facts which are not held together through theory call for 
labels. People who do not think in terms of relations are 
Hkely to be insistent upon names. Labels or names for sex 
disposition or acts are, as a matter of fact, very definite in the 
American vernacular. " Engaged," " attentive," " devoted," 
" a married man," " a man of family," " a grass widow," " a 
good woman," " a bad woman " — there is no end to such tags. 
Again, intimacy between a man and a woman is referred defi- 
nitely to the act of consummation, a sex relation is strictly 
classified according to whether or not it is physically consum- 
mated. In this attitude towards sex boundaries or captions 
may lie the explanation, incidentally, of what is a constant 
puzzle to the European visitor — the freedom of social inter- 
course allowed to the youth of opposite sexes. Since consum- 
mation only constitutes sexual intimacy in American opinion, 
and since consummation, it is assumed, is utterly out of the 
question, why raise barriers between boys and girls? The 
assumption that consummation is out of the question is, by and 
large, correct, which is still another puzzzle. To this some clue 
may be found, I think, in our concluding discussion. 

Fondness for captions and for the sort of classification that 



314 CIVILIZATION 

is so likely to paralyze perception of the finer distinctions 
and to arrest thought^ are natural enough in a child, learning 
language and so pressed upon by the multiplicity of phenom- 
ena that in self-protection he must make rough classifications 
and remain unaware of much. The old who are dying to life 
are also exclusive, and they, too, cling to formulas. Is Ameri- 
can culture in the matter of sex childish and immature, as 
Americans imply when they refer to their " young country," or 
is the culture representative of the aged; are Americans born 
old, as now and again a European critic asserts? 

Such terms of age are figurative, of course, unless we take 
them in a historical sense, meaning either that a new culture 
was developed in this country — or rather that there were fresh 
developments of an old culture — or that an old culture was 
introduced and maintained without significant change. This 
is not the place to discuss the cultural aspects of Colonial 
America, but it is important to bear in mind in any discussion 
of merely contemporaneous sex attitudes in this country the 
contributions of European, and more particularly, English 
morality. Without recalling the traditions of early Christian- 
ity or of English Puritanism, those attitudes of ignoring or 
suppressing the satisfactions of the impulses of sex to which we 
have referred were indeed incomprehensible and bewildering — 
mere psychological interpretation seems inadequate. But 
viewed as consequences of the sense of sin in connection with 
sex, which was a legacy from Paul and his successors in English 
Puritanism, interpretation is less difficult, and the American at- 
titude toward sex becomes comparative! v intelligible — the atti- 
tude seen in divorce and in the melodramas, and in the stand- 
ardizing of sex relations, in accordance with that most signifi- 
cant of Pauline dogmas that marriage is the lesser of two evils, 
that it is better to marry than to burn. Without the key of 
Paul and of the obscenities of the early Christian Fathers how 
explain the recent legislation in Virginia making it a crime 
to pay attention to a married man or woman, or such a ser- 
mon as was recently preached somewhere in the Middle West 
urging a crusade against the practice of taking another man's 
wife in to dinner or dancing round dances? " At a dinner of 
friends let every man take his own wife on his arm and walk 



SEX 31S 

in to their seats side by side at the dinner table to the inspiring 
music of ' Onward Christian Soldiers/ " urged the minister. 
As to dancing, whenever a man is seen to put his arm around 
a woman who is not his wife, the band should cease playing. 
I do not quote the words of the latter injunction, as they are 
rather too indecent. 

Turning from the historical back to the psychological point 
of view — in one of those circles of cause and effect that are 
composed now of cultural inheritance or tradition, now of psy- 
chological trend or disposition — the American case of sex, 
whether a case of adolescence or of senescence, may be said to 
present symptoms of arrested development. Together with 
the non-realism of childish or senile formula, there is here the 
kind of emotionalism which checks emotional vitality and 
which is fed upon the sense of crisis ; we may call it crisis-emo- 
tion. Life at large, the sex life in particular, is presented 
as a series of crises preceded and followed by a static condi- 
tion, and in these conventional times of crisis only, the times 
when the labels are being attached, are the emotions aroused. 
In the intervals, in the stretches between betrothal, marriage, 
birth, christening, or divorce, there is little or no sense of 
change — none of the emotions that correspond to changing re- 
lations and are expressions of personal adjustment. The emo- 
tions of crisis are statutory, pre-determined, conventionalized; 
neither for oneself nor for others do they make any demands 
upon imagination, or insight, or spiritual concern. 

Here in this psychology of crisis is the clue — before men- 
tioned — to an understanding of the freedom allowed our youth, 
of " bundling," as the Colonials termed it, or, in current phrase, 
" petting." In general, " keeping company " is accounted 
one kind of a relationship, marriage, another — one character- 
ized by courtship without consummation, the other by con- 
summation without courtship. Between the two kinds of re- 
lationship there is no transition, it is assumed, except by con- 
vention or ritual. So inrooted is this social attitude that the 
young cannot escape adopting it, at least the very young to 
whom, at any rate, uncritical conservatism seems to be natural. 
Indeed the taboo on unritualized consummation partakes 
enough of the absolutism of the taboo, shall we say, on incest, 



3i6 CIVILIZATION 

to preclude any risk of individual youthful experimentation 
or venture across the boundary lines set by the Elders. 

Given these boundary lines^ given a psychology of crisis, all 
too readily the sex relations, in marriage or out, become stale, 
flat, colourless, or of the nature of debauch, which is only an- 
other aspect of crisis-psychology. Sex relations perforce be- 
come limited to two conventions, marriage and prostitution. 
Prostitute or wife, the conjugal or the disorderly house, these 
are the alternatives. In formulaic crisis-psychology there may 
be no other station of emotional experiment or range of emo- 
tional expression. 

That a man should " sow his wild oats " before marriage, 
and after marriage " settle down," is becoming throughout the 
country a somewhat archaic formula, at least in so far as wild 
oats means exposure to venereal disease; but there has been 
no change, so far as I am aware, in the attitude towards the 
second part of the formula on settling down — in conjugal seg- 
regation. The married are as obtrusively married as ever, and 
their attitude towards persons of the opposite sex as dull and 
forbidding. Few " happily married " women but refer inces- 
santly in their conversation to their husband's opinion or stand; 
and what devoted husband will fail to mention his wife in one 
way or another as a notice of his immunity against the appeal 
of sex in any degree by any other woman? Shortly after the 
war, a certain American woman of my acquaintance who was 
travelling in France found herself without money and in dan- 
ger of being put off her train before reaching Paris and her 
banker's. She found a fellow-countryman and told him her 
predicament. He was quite willing to pay her fare; she was 
an American and a woman, but she was informed firmly and 
repeatedly that her knight was a married man, and besides, he 
was travelling with his business partner. Soon after I heard 
this anecdote I happened to repeat it to a Chicago lawyer who 
promptly joined in the laugh over the American man's timidity. 
" Still, a married man travelling can't be too prudent," he fin- 
ished off. 

Circumspection towards women, in travel or elsewhere, or, 
better still, indifference towards women, is the standardized 
attitude of American husbands. In marriage, too, a relation- 



SEX 317 

ship of status rather than of attention to the fluctuations of 
personality, indifference to psychical experience, is a not un- 
common marital trait. American men in general, as Europeans 
have noted, are peculiarly indifferent to the psychology of 
women. They are also peculiarly sentimental about women, 
a trait quite consistent with indifference or ignorance, but one 
which, in view of American prostitution and the persistent 
exclusion of many women from equal opportunities for educa- 
tion and for life, gives an ugly look of hypocrisy to the trum- 
peters of American chivalry. 

And yet subject the American concept of chivalry to a little 
scrutiny and the taunt, at least of hypocrisy, will miss the mark. 
For the concept is, both actually and historically, a part of the 
already noted classification of women as more or less seques- 
tered, on the one hand, and unsequestered or loose on the other, 
as inexperienced and over-experienced or, more accurately, par- 
tially over-experienced. In this classification the claims of 
both classes of women are settled by men on an economic basis, 
with a few sentimentalities about womanhood, pure or impure, 
thrown in for good measure. The personality of the woman 
a man feels that he is supporting, whether as wife or prostitute, 
may, theoretically, be disregarded and, along with her person- 
ality, her capacity for sexual response. Whether as a creature 
of sin or as an object of chivalry, a woman becomes a deper- 
sonalized, and, sexually, an unresponsive being. 

People sometimes forget this when they discuss the relations 
between men and women in this country, and especially the 
sexlessness or coldness of American women. They forget it in 
arguing against the feminizing of education, the theatre, litera- 
ture, etc., meaning, not that women run the schools or are 
market for the arts, but that immature, sexless women are in 
these ways too much to the fore. In part at least it is thanks 
to chivalry or to her " good and considerate husband " that 
the American woman, the non-wage earner at least, does not 
grow up, and that it is possible for so many women to marry 
without having any but the social consequences of marriage in 
mind. One surmises that there are numbers, very large num- 
bers, of American women, married as well as unmarried, who 
have felt either no stirring of sex at all or at most only the 



3i8 CIVILIZATION 

generalized sex stir of pre-adolescence. What proportion of 
women marry " for a home " or to escape from a home, or a 
job, and what proportion marry for love? After marriage, 
with the advent of children, what of these proportions? 

Marriage for a home or for the sake of children, chivalry, 
" consideration " for the wife, all these attitudes are matters 
of status, not of personality, and to personality, not to status, 
love must look, since love is an art, not a formula. It often 
seems that in American culture, whether in marriage or out, 
little or no place is open to this patient, ardent, and discerning 
art, and that lovers are invariably put to flight. Even if they 
make good their escape, their adventure is without social sig- 
nificance, since it is perforce surreptitious. Only when adven- 
turers and artists in love are tolerated enough to be able to come 
out from under cover, and to be at least allowed to live, if only 
as variants from the commonplace, may they contribute of their 
spirit or art to the general culture. 

Elsie Clews Parsons 



THE FAMILY 

THE American family is the scapegoat of the nations. 
Foreign critics visit us and report that children are for- 
ward and incorrigible, that wives are pampered and extrava- 
gant, and that husbands are henpecked and cultureless. Nor 
is this the worst. It only skims the surface by comparison 
with the strictures of home-grown criticism. Our domestic 
arbiters of every school have a deeper fault to find: they see 
the family as a crumbling institution, a swiftly falling bulwark. 
Catholic pulpits call upon St. Joseph to save the ruins and 
Puritan moralists invoke Will Carlton, believing in common 
with most of our public guardians that only saints and senti- 
mentalism can help in such a crisis. Meanwhile the American 
family shows the usual tenacity of form, beneath much super- 
ficial change, uniting in various disguises the most ancient and 
the newest modes of living. In American family life, if any- 
where, the Neolithic meets the modern and one needs to be 
very rash or very wise to undertake the nice job of finding 
out which is which. But one at least refuses to defeat one's 
normal curiosity by joining in the game of blind-man's buff, 
by means of which public opinion about the family secures a 
maximum of activity along with a minimum of knowledge. 

A little science would be of great help. But popular opinion 
does not encourage scientific probing of the family. In this 
field, not honesty but evasion is held to be the best policy. 
Rather than venture where taboo is so rife and the material so 
sensitive, American science would much rather promote domes- 
tic dyes and seedless oranges. It is true that we have the Fed- 
eral Census with its valuable though restrained statistics. But 
even the census has always taken less interest in family status 
and family composition, within the population, than in the 
classification of property and occupation and the fascinating 
game of "watching Tulsa grow." In no country is the collec- 
tion of vital statistics so neglected and sporadic and the total 

319 



320 CIVILIZATION 

yield of grab-bag facts so unamenable to correlation. Through 
the persistent effort of the Children's Bureau, this situation 
has been considerably improved during the past ten years; so 
that now there exist the so-called " registration areas " where 
births, marriages, and deaths are actually recorded. For the 
country as a whole, these vital facts still go unregistered. The 
prevailing sketchiness in the matter of vital statistics is in dis- 
tinct contrast to the energy and thoroughness with which 
American political machinery manages to keep track of the 
individual who has passed the age of twenty-one. 

One of the tendencies, statistically verified, of the native 
family is its reduction in size. In the first place the circum- 
ference of the family circle has grown definitely smaller 
through the loss of those adventitious members, the maiden 
aunt and the faithful servant. The average number of adult 
females in the typical household is nowadays just one. The 
odd women are out in the world on their own; they no longer 
live " under the roofs " of their brothers-in-law. Miss Lulu 
Bett is almost an anachronism in 1920. The faithful servant 
has been replaced by the faithless one, who never by any 
chance remains long enough to become a familial appendage, 
or else she has not been replaced at all. Even " Grandma " 
has begun to manifest symptoms of preferring to be on her 
own. Thus the glory of the patriarchal household has visibly 
departed, leaving only the biological minimum in its stead. 

In the dwindling of this ultimate group lies the crux of the 
matter. The American grows less and less prolific, and panicky 
theorists can already foresee a possible day when the last 100 
per cent. American Adam and the last 100 per cent. American 
Eve will take their departure from our immigrationized stage. 
It is providentially arranged — the maxim tells us — that the 
trees shall not grow and grow until they pierce the heavens; 
but is there any power on the job of preventing the progressive 
decline of the original Anglo-Saxon stock even to the point of 
final extinction? This is a poignant doubt in a country where 
the Anglo-Saxon strain enjoys a prestige out of all proportion 
to its population quota. The strain may derive what comfort 
it can from the reflection that the exit of the Indian was prob- 
ably not due to birth control. 



THE FAMILY 321 

Still, birth control is not new. If it did not originate with 
the Indians, it did at least with the Puritans. As the census 
books and genealogy books show, every succeeding American 
generation has manifested a tendency to reduce the birth-rate. 
The new aspects of the situation are the acceleration of the 
tendency and the propaganda for family limitation by artificial 
methods. In the birth registration area, which includes twenty- 
three States, the number of births for the year 1919 compared 
with those for 1918 showed a slump of seven per cent. Also 
the current assumption that children are more numerous on 
farms, where they are an economic asset, than they are in 
cities, where they became an economic handicap, has recently 
received a startling correction through a survey made by the 
Department of Agriculture. Among the surprises of the study, 
says the report, was the small number of children in farm 
homes: — " Child life is at a premium in rural districts." The 
farm is not the national child reserve it has been supposed to 
be. As far as the salaried class is concerned, it has stood 
out as the national pace-setter in family limitation. The edi- 
torial writer of the New York Times, who may be trusted for 
a fairly accurate statement of the standards of this group, 
justifies its conduct thus: " Unless the brain-worker is willing 
to disclass his children, to subject them to humiliation, he 
must be willing to feed, clothe, and educate them during many 
years. In such circumstances, to refuse parenthood is only 
human." It therefore remains for the manual worker, who 
cannot obtain from his Church the same absolution that the 
suburban resident can obtain from his Times, to produce the 
bulk of the population. This, as a whole, is not yet stationary; 
the recent census estimates an annual excess of births over 
deaths throughout the United States amounting to about one 
per cent. What will the next decade do with it? 

A peculiar feature of the American propaganda for birth 
control is its specific advocacy of artificial methods. The de- 
fenders of this cause have been compelled, it appears, to de- 
fine a position which would be self-evident in any society not 
incorrigibly Puritan. People who regard celibacy as a state 
of grace and celibacy within marriage as a supreme moral vic- 
tory are still growing, it would seem, on every bush. This 



322 CIVILIZATION 

unwholesome belief must have its effect upon the birth control 
methods of the married population. It is a matter of specula- 
tion how many marriages succumb to its influence, especially 
after the birth of a second or third child; but there is reason 
to believe that the ascetic method is by no means uncommon. 
You cannot hold up an ideal before people steadily for forty 
years without expecting some of them to try to follow it. This 
kind of rigorous negativism passes for morality in America and 
finds its strongest devotees among the middle-aged and the 
heads of families. Such people are greatly shocked at the wild 
conduct of the young who are certainly out of bounds since the 
war; but the most striking feature of the current wave of so- 
called immorality is the exposure of the bankruptcy of ideals 
among the older generation. There are thirty million families 
in the United States; presumably there are at least sixty mil- 
lion adults who have experimented with the sexual relationship 
with the sanction of society. But experience has taught them 
nothing if one may judge by the patented and soulless concepts 
which still pass for sexual morality among people who are 
surely old enough to have learned about life from living it. 

The population policies of the government are confined to 
the supply through immigration. A few years ago, an Ameri- 
can president enunciated population policies of his own and 
conducted an energetic though solitary campaign against " race 
suicide." But no faction rallied to his standard, no organiza- 
tion rose up to speed his message. His bugle-call was politely 
disregarded as the personal idiosyncrasy of a popular presi- 
dent who happened to be the proud father of six children. 
Mr. Roosevelt was evidently out of tune with his own genera- 
tion, as, no doubt, Mr. Washington was with his, for exactly 
the opposite reason. But the more retiring nature of our first 
president saved him from the egoistic error of regarding his 
own familial situation as the only proper and desirable example. 
The complete failure of Mr. Roosevelt's crusade is significant. 
There are clerical influences in America which actively fight 
race suicide, but with these obscurantist allies the doughty 
son of a Dutch Reform family had too little else in common. 
Among the men of his own class he stirred not an echo. Is it 
because the American husband is too uxorious or too indif- 



THE FAMILY 323 

ferent? I have heard a married man say, " It is too much to 
expert of any woman;" and still another one explain, "The 
Missis said it was my turn next and so we stopped with one." 
Or is there any explanation in the fact that the American 
father tends more and more to spend his life in a salaried job 
and has little land or business to bequeath? Whatever the 
reason, the Business Man is in accord with the Club Woman 
on the subject of birth control, in practice if not in theory. 

So far as relative distribution of income is concerned, the 
families of the United States fare much as those in the indus- 
trial countries of Europe. In 1910, the same relative inequal- 
ity of wealth and income existed in feudal Prussia and demo- 
cratic America. The richest fifth of the families in each 
country claimed about half the income while the poorest two- 
thirds of the families were thankful for about one-third. The 
same law of economic relativity falls alike on the just Ameri- 
can and the unjust Prussian. But the American family, it 
appears, is in every case two or three times better off than the 
corresponding family in Prussia. You must multiply Herr 
Stinnes by two to get a Judge Gary and the wealth of a Silesian 
child labourer is only half that of a Georgia mill-child. This 
economic advantage of our American rich and poor alike is 
measured chiefly in dollars and marks and not in actual stand- 
ards of living. It is apparently difficult to get real standards 
of living out into the open; otherwise the superior fortune of 
American families of every estate might be less evident. Some 
of us who may have visited middle-class Prussian people only 
half as well off as ourselves probably did not commiserate the 
poor things as they deserved. My hostess, I recall, had eight 
hundred dollars a year on which she maintained an apart- 
ment of two rooms, bath, and kitchen; kept a part-time maid; 
bought two new suits a year; drove out in a hired carriage on 
Sunday; and contributed generously to a society which stirred 
up women to call themselves Frau instead of Fraulein. Any 
" single woman " in an American city of equal size who could 
have managed as much in those days on fifteen hundred a year 
would certainly have deserved a thumping thrift-prize. . . . 
And then there were all those poor little children in a Black 
Forest village, who had to put up with rye bread six days in 



324 CIVILIZATION 

the week and white bread only on Sundays. Transported to 
America, they might have had package crackers every day and 
ice-cream sandwiches on Sunday. One wonders whether the 
larger income of the American family is not largely spent on 
things of doubtful value and pinchbeck quality. 

According to theory, the income of the family normally be- 
longs to the man of the house. According to theory, he has 
earned it or derived it from some lawful business enterprise. 
" The head of the family ordinarily divides income between 
himself and his various dependents in the proportion that he 
deems best," says Mr. Willford King. The American husband 
has a peculiarly unblemished reputation as a provider — and 
probably deserves it. Certainly few husbands in the world 
are so thoughtful of their widows; they invest extensively in 
life insurance but rarely in annuities against a period of retire- 
ment. Trust Companies remind them through advertisements 
every day to make their wills, and cemetery corporations nag 
them incessantly to buy their graves. "Statistics show that 
women outlive men! " says the promoter of America's Burial 
Park. "They show that the man who puts off the selection of 
a burial place leaves the task to the widow in her grief. For 
the man it is easy now — for the woman an ordeal then." The 
chivalry of the business man leads him to contrive all sorts 
of financial mechanisms for his widow's convenience and pro- 
tection. His will, like his insurance policy, is in her favour. 
Unlike the European husband, he hates to leave the man's 
world of business and to spend his declining years in the so- 
ciety of his wife. After he is dead, she is welcome to his all, 
but so long as he lives he keeps business between them. 

Though in life and death a generous provider, he is not a 
systematic one. Financial arrangements between husband 
and Vv^ife are extremely casual. As the dowry hardly exists, 
so a regular cash allowance is very rare. He loves to hold the 
purse-strings and let her run the bills. This tendency is known 
in the outside business world, and the American wife, there- 
fore, enjoys a command of credit which would amaze any 
solvent foreign housekeeper. She has accounts on every hand. 
She orders food by telephone or through the grocer's boy 
and " charges it." The department store expects her to have 



THE FAMILY 325 

a charge account, and gives her better service if she does. For 
instance, the self-supporting woman who is, for obvious reasons, 
more inclined to pay as she goes, finds herself discriminated 
against in the matter of returning or exchanging goods. In 
numerous ways, the charge account has the inside track. This 
would not seem strange if credit were limited to the richest 
fraction. But that is not the case; almost every housewife in 
the country has credit, from the Newport ladies to the miners' 
wives who " trade at the company store." The only difference 
is that, in the case of these two extremes — Newport and the 
company store — longer credit than uusal seems to be the rule. 
In the meantime, the preaching of thrift to the American 
housewife goes on incessantly by apostles from a business 
world which is largely organized on the assumption that she 
does not possess it and which would be highly disconcerted if 
she actually developed it. American business loves the house- 
wife for the same reason that it loves China — that is, for her 
economic backwardness. 

The record of the American husband as a provider is not 
uniform for all classes. In Congress it is now and then as- 
serted with appropriate oratory that there are no classes in 
America. This is more or less true from the point of view of 
a Cabin Creek vote-getter, who lives in a factitious political 
world, where economic realities fail to penetrate; to him 
middle-class and working-class are much the same since they 
have equal rights not to " scratch the ticket." But the econo- 
mist finds it convenient, as has been said, to classify the totality 
of American families in definite income-groups corresponding 
to the Prussian classes. As one descends the income scale 
one finds that the American husband no longer fulfils his 
reputation for being sole provider for his family. According 
to Edgar Sydenstricker, " less than half of the wage-earners' 
families in the United States, whose heads are at work, have 
been found to be supported by the earnings of the husband or 
father." The earnings of the mother and the children are a 
necessary supplement to bring the family income up to the 
subsistence level. Half the workingmen, who have dutifully 
" founded " families, cannot support them. According to the 
latest figures published, it costs $2,334 a year to keep a family 



326 CIVILIZATION 

of five in New York. Have the young Lochinvars of the tene- 
ments never heard of those appalling figures? Very hkely they 
have a premonition, if not an actual picture of the digits. In 
any case they have their mothers to warn them. " Henry's 
brought it on himself," said the janitress. " He had a right 
not to get married. He had his mother to take care of him." 
If he had only chosen bachelorhood, he might have lived at 
home in comfort and peace on his twenty-five a week. But 
having chosen, or been chosen by, Mrs. Henry instead, it is 
now up to the latter to go out office-cleaning or operating, 
which she very extensively does. It is estimated that since 
the war fully one-third of all American women in industry are 
married. 

Going back up the scale to the middle-class wife, we find 
new influences at work upon her situation. Custom has re- 
laxed its condemnation of the economically independent wife, 
and perhaps it is just as well that it has done so. For this is 
the class which has suffered the greatest comparative loss of 
fortune, during the last fifteen years. " If all estimates cited 
are correct," writes Mr. Willford King, " it indicates that, since 
1896, there has occurred a marked concentration of income in 
the hands of the very rich; that the poor have relatively lost 
but little; but that the middle class has been the principal suf- 
ferer." It is, then, through the sacrifices of our middle-class 
families that our very richest families have been able to im- 
prove their standard of living. The poor, of course, have had 
no margin on which to practise such benevolence, but the gen- 
erous middle-class has given till it hurts. The deficit had to 
be relieved, the only possible way being through the economic 
utilization of the women. At first daughters became self-sup- 
porting, while wives still tarried in the odour of domestic sanc- 
tity; then wives came to be sporadically self-supporting. The 
war, like peace still bearing hardest on the middle-class, en- 
hanced all this. Nine months after the armistice, fifty per 
cent, more women were employed in industry than there were 
in the year before the war. 

In America, we have no surplus women. The countries of 
western Europe are each encumbered with a million or two, 
and their existence is regarded as the source of acute social 



THE FAMILY 327 

problems. What shall be done with them is a matter of earnest 
consideration and anxious statecraft. America has been spared 
all this. She has also no surplus men — or none that anybody 
has ever heard of. It is true that the population in 19 10 con- 
sisted of ninety-one millions, of whom forty-seven millions 
were men and forty-four were women. There were three mil- 
lion more men than women, but for some reason they were 
not surplus or " odd " men and they have never been a " prob- 
lem." The population figures for 1920, — one hundred and 
five millions, — have not yet been divided by sexes, but the 
chances are that there is still a man for every woman in the 
country, and two men apiece for a great number of them. 
However, no one seems to fear polyandry for America as 
polygamy is now feared in Europe. 

The situation is exceptional in New England where the t3TD- 
ical European condition is duplicated. Beyond the Berkshire 
Hills, all the surplus women of America are concentrated. In 
the United States as a whole there are a hundred and five men 
for each one hundred women, but in New England the balance 
shifts suddenly to the other side. Within the present century, 
a gradual increase has taken place in the masculine contingent 
owing to immigration. But the chances of marriage have not 
correspondingly improved, for matches are rarely made be- 
tween New England spinsters and Armenian weavers or Nea- 
politan bootblacks. 

In America only the very rich and the very poor marry 
early. Factory girls and heiresses are, as a rule, the youngest 
brides. It is generally assumed that twenty-four for women 
and twenty-nine for men are the usual ages for marriage the 
country over. Custom varies enormously, of course, in so 
polyglot a population. Now and then an Italian daughter ac- 
quires a husband before the compulsory education law is 
through with her. In such cases, however, there is apparently 
a gentleman's agreement between the truant officer and the 
lady's husband which solves the dilemma. At the opposite ex- 
treme from these little working-class Juliets are the mature 
brides of Boston. As the result of a survey covering the last 
ten years, the registrar of marriage licenses discovered that 
the women married between twenty-seven and thirty-three and 



328 CIVILIZATION 

the men between thirty and forty. Boston's average marriage 
age for both sexes is over thirty. This does not represent an 
inordinate advance upon the practice of the primitive Bos- 
tonians. According to certain American genealogists, the 
Puritans of the 17th century were in no great haste to wed 
■ — the average age of the bride being twenty-one and of the 
bridegroom twenty-five. The marriage age in the oldest Amer- 
ican city has moved up about ten years in a couple of cen- 
turies. The change is usually ascribed to increasing economic 
obstacles, and nobody questions its desirability. Provided that 
celibacy is all that it seems to be, the public stands ready to 
admire every further postponement of the marriage age as 
evidence of an ever-growing self-control and the triumphant 
march of civilization. 

In the majority of marriages, the American wife outlives 
her husband. This is partly because he is several years older 
than she and partly because she tends to be longer-lived than 
he. Americans of the second and third generation are charac- 
terized by great longevity,^ — the American woman of Ameri- 
can descent being the longest-lived human being on earth. 
Consequently the survivors of marriage are more likely to be 
widows than widowers. In the census of 1910, there were 
about two million and a half widows of forty-five or over as 
compared with about one million widowers of corresponding 
age. Nor do they sit by the fire and knit as once upon a 
time; they too must " hustle." Among the working women 
of the country are a million and a quarter who are more than 
forty-five and who are probably to a very large extent — 
though the census provides no data on the subject — econom- 
ically independent widows. As was said before, " Grandma " 
too is on her own nowadays. 

The widow enjoys great honour in American public life, al- 
though it usually turns out to be rather a spurious and 
sentimental homage. Political orators easily grow tearful 
over her misfortunes. For generations after the Civil War, 
the Republican Party throve on a pension-system which gath- 
ered in the youngest widow of the oldest veteran, and Tam- 
many has always understood how to profit from its ostentatious 
alms-giving to widows and orphans. From my earliest child- 



THE FAMILY 329 

hood, I can recollect how the town-beautifiers, who wanted to 
take down the crazy board fences, were utterly routed by the 
aldermen who said the widow's cow must range and people 
must therefore keep up their fences. Similarly, the Southern 
States have never been able to put through adequate child 
labour laws because the widow's child had to be allowed to 
earn in order to support his mother. All this sentimentalism 
proved to be in time an excellent springboard for a genuine 
economic reform — the widow's pension systems of the several 
states which would be more accurately described as children's 
pensions. The legislatures were in no position to resist an ap- 
peal on behalf of the poor widow and so nicely narcotized were 
they by their traditional tender-heartedness that they failed 
to perceive the socialistic basis of this new kind of widow's 
pensions. Consequently America has achieved the curious 
honour of leading in a socialistic innovation which European 
States are now only just beginning to copy. Maternity insur- 
ance, on the other hand, has made no headway in America 
although adopted years and even decades ago in European 
countries. With us the obstacle seems to be prudishness 
rather than capitalism — it makes a legislator blush to hear 
childbirth spoken of in public while it only makes him cry to 
hear of widowhood. 

One aspect of widowhood is seldom touched upon and that 
is its prevention. Aged widows, on the whole, in spite of their 
soap-boxing and their wage-earning, are a very lonely race. 
Why must they bring it on themselves by marrying men whose 
expectation of life is so much less than theirs? And yet so 
anxious are the marrying people to observe this conventional 
disparity of age, that if the bride happens to be but by three 
months the senior of the bridegroom, they conceal it hence- 
forth as a sort of family disgrace. Even if this convention 
should prove to be immutable, is there nothing to be done 
about the lesser longevity of the American male? There is a 
life extension institute with an ex-president at the head but, as 
far as I am aware, it has never enlisted the support of the 
millions reported by the census as widows, who surely, if any- 
body, should realize the importance of such a movement. It is 
commonly assumed that the earlier demise of husbands is due 



330 CIVILIZATION 

to the hazardous life they lead in business and in industry; but 
domestic life is not without its hazards, and child-bearing is 
an especially dangerous trade in the United States, which has 
the highest maternal death-rate of seventeen civilized coun- 
tries. If American husbands were less philosophical about 
the hardships of child-bed — the judgment of Eve and all that 
sort of thing — and American wives were less philosophical 
about burying their husbands — the Lord hath given and the 
Lord hath taken away and so on — it might result in greater 
health and happiness for all concerned. 

But the main trouble with American marriage, as all the 
world knows, is that divorce so often separates the twain be- 
fore death has any chance to discriminate between them. The 
growing prevalence of divorce is statistically set forth in a 
series of census investigations. In 1890, there was one di- 
vorce to every sixteen marriages; in 1900, there was one to 
every twelve marriages; and in 191 6, there was one to every 
nine marriages. The number of marriages in proportion to 
the population has also increased during the same period, 
though not at a rate equal to that of divorce. But divorce, 
being so much younger than marriage, has had more room to 
grow from its first humble scared beginnings of fifty years ago. 
Queen Victoria's frown had a very discouraging effect on di- 
vorce in America; and Mrs. Humphry Ward, studying the 
question among us in the early 20th century, lent her personal 
influence towards the arrest of the American evil. We also 
have raised up on this side of the water our own apostles against 
divorce, among whom Mr. Horace Greeley perhaps occupies 
the first and most distinguished place. But in spite of all 
heroic crusades, divorce has continued to grow. One even sus- 
pects that the marked increase in the marriage rate is partly — 
perhaps largely — due to the remarriage of the divorced. At 
any rate, they constitute new and eligible material for mar- 
riage which formerly was lacking. 

The true cause of the increase of divorce in America is not 
easy to come by. Commissions and investigations have wor- 
ried the question to no profitable end, and have triumphantly 
come out by the same door by which they went in. That seems 
to be the test of a successful divorce inquiry; and no wonder, 



1 



THE FAMILY 331 

for the real quest means a conflict with hypocrisy and preju- 
dice, fear and taboo, which only the intrepid spirit of a John 
Milton or a Susan B. Anthony is able to sustain. The people 
who want divorces and who can pay for them seem to be able 
to get them nowadays, and since it is the truth only that suf- 
fers the situation has grown more tolerable. 

In the meantime, there are popular impressions and assump- 
tions which do not tally with the known facts. It is assumed 
that divorce is frequent in America because it is easy, and 
that the logical way to reduce it would be to make it difficult. 
Certain States of the West have lenient divorce laws but other 
States have stringent laws, while South Carolina abolished di- 
vorce entirely in 1878. On the whole, our laws are not so 
lenient as those of Scandinavia, whose divorce rate is still far 
behind that of the United States. Neither is divorce cheap in 
America; it is enormously expensive. Therefore for the poor 
it is practically inaccessible. The Domestic Relations Courts do 
not grant divorce and the Legal Aid Societies will not touch it. 
The wage-earning class, like the inhabitants of South Carolina, 
just have to learn to get along without it. Then there is an- 
other belief, hardly justified by the facts, that most divorced 
wives get alimony. Among all the divorces granted in 191 6, 
alimony was not even asked for by 73 per cent, of the wives 
and it was received altogether by less than 20 per cent, of them. 
The statistics do not tell us whether the actual recipients of 
alimony were the mothers of young children or whether they 
were able-bodied ladies without offspring. The average Amer- 
ican divorce court could not be trusted to see any difference 
between them. 

The war has naturally multiplied the actions for divorce in 
every country. It was not for nothing that the British gov- 
ernment called the stipends paid to soldiers' wives " separation 
allowances." The war-time conditions had a tendency to 
unmake marriages as well as to make them. The momentary 
spread of divorce has revived again the idea of a uniform di- 
vorce law embodied in an amendment to the Federal Consti- 
tution. As no reasonable law can possibly be hoped for, the 
present state of confusion is infinitely to be preferred as af- 
fording at least some choice of resources to the individual who 



332 CIVILIZATION 

is seeking relief. If there were any tendency to take divorce 
cases out of the hands of the lawyers, as has been done with 
industrial accidents, and to put it into domestic relations courts 
where it belongs; if there were the least possibility of curbing 
the vested interest of the newspapers in divorce news; if there 
were any dawning appreciation of the absurdity of penalizing 
as connivance the most unanswerable reason for divorce, that 
is, mutual consent; if there were any likelihood that the lying 
and spying upon which divorce action must usually depend for 
its success would be viewed as the grossest immorality in the 
whole situation ; if there were any hope whatever that a states- 
man might rise up in Congress and, like Johan Castberg of 
Norway, defend a legal measure which would help ordinary 
men and women to speak the truth in their personal relation- 
ships — if there were any prospect that any of these influences 
would have any weight in the deliberations of Congress, one 
might regard the possibilities of Federal action with a gleam 
of hope. But since nothing of the kind can be expected, the 
best that can happen in regard to divorce in the near future 
is for Congress to leave it alone. There is a strong tradition 
in the historical suffrage movement of America which favours 
liberal divorce laws and which makes it improbable that a 
reactionary measure could gain sufficient support from the 
feminine electorate. Since the majority of those who seek 
divorce in this country are women, it seems to put them log- 
ically on the side of dissoluble marriage. 

Though home is a sacred word in America, it is a portable 
affair. Migration is a national habit, handed down and still 
retained from the days when each generation went out to break 
new ground. The disasters of the Civil War sent Southern 
families and New England families scurrying to the far West. 
The development of the railway and express systems produced 
as a by-product a type of family life that was necessarily 
nomadic. The men of the railway " Brotherhoods " have 
always been marrying men, and their families acquired the art 
of living on wheels, as it were. Rich farmers of the Middle 
West retire to spend their old age in a California cottage sur- 
rounded by an orange grove — and the young farmers move to 
the city. The American family travels on any and every ex- 



THE FAMILY 333 

cuse. The neurotic pursuit of health has built up large com- 
munities in Colorado, Arizona, and other points West. Whole 
families " picked up," as the saying goes, and set out for the 
miraculous climate that was to save one of its members from 
the dreaded tuberculosis — and then later had to move again 
because somebody's heart couldn't stand the " altitude." The 
extreme examples of this nomadic habit are found among the 
families of the very poor and the very rich, who have regular 
seasonal migrations. The oyster canners and strawberry- 
pickers have a mobility which is only equalled by that of the 
Palm Beachers. And finally there is the curious practice of 
New England which keeps boarders in the summer-time in 
order that it may be boarded by Florida in the winter-time. 
By contrast with all this geographical instability, the stable 
sway of convention and custom stands out impressively. With 
each change of environment, family tradition became more 
sacred. Unitarians who moved to Kansas were more zealous 
in the faith than ever, and F.F.V.'s who settled in Texas were 
fiercely and undyingly loyal to the memory of Pocahontas. 
Families that were always losing their background, tried to 
fixate in some form the ancestral prestige which threatened 
always to evaporate. Organizations composed of the Sons 
and Daughters of the Revolution, of the descendants of the 
Pilgrims, of Civil War Veterans, of the Scions of the Confed- 
eracy, and so on, sprang up and flourished on the abundant soil 
of family pride. All of which means that pioneering brought 
no spiritual independence or intellectual rebirth, and that new 
conditions were anxiously reformulated under the sanction of 
the old. Above all, sanction was important. That incredible 
institution, the " society column " of the local newspaper, took 
up the responsibility where the Past laid it down. Stereotyped 
values of yesterday gave way to stereotyped values of to-day. 
This was the commercial opportunity of a multitude of home 
journals and women's magazines which undertook — by means 
of stories, pictures, and advertisements — to regiment the last 
detail of home life. But the perforated patterns, the foods 
" shot from guns," and all the rest of the labour-saving ingenui- 
ties which came pouring into the home and which were sup- 
posed to mean emancipation for mothers and their families, 



334 CIVILIZATION 

brought little of the real spirit of freedom in their wake. Our 
materialistic civilization finds it hard to understand that lib- 
erty is not achieved through time-saving devices but only 
through the love of it. 

But the notorious spoiling of the American child — some one 
says — is not that a proper cradle of liberty for the personality? 
A spoilt child may be a nuisance, but if he is on the way to- 
wards becoming a self-reliant, self-expressive adult, the 
" American way " of bringing up children may have its pecu- 
liar advantages. But a spoilt child is really a babyish child, 
and by that token he is on the way towards becoming a childish 
adult. Neither is his case disposed of simply by adjudging 
him a nuisance; the consequence of his spoiling carry much 
further than that. They are seen, for instance, in malnutri- 
tion of the children of the American rich — a fact which has 
but recently been discovered and which came as a great sur- 
prise to the experts. " In Chicago," one of them tells us, " it 
was found that a group of foreign children near the stockyards 
were only 17 per cent, underweight, while in the all-American 
group near the University of Chicago they were 57 per cent, 
below normal." The same condition of things was found in a 
select and expensive boarding school in the neighbourhood of 
Boston. A pathetic commentary — is it not? — on a country 
which leads the world in food-packing and food-profits, that 
it should contain so many parents who, with all the resources 
of the earth at their command, do not know how to feed their 
own children. Surely, the famous American spoiling has 
something to do with this. Whether it may not also be behind 
the vast amount of mental disturbance in the population may 
well be considered. The asylums are suddenly over-crowded. 
The National Committee for Mental Hygiene suggests for our 
consolation that this may be because the asylums are so much 
more humane than they used to be and the families of the 
sufferers are more willing than formerly to consign them to 
institutions. 

It is the fashion to attribute all these mental tragedies to 
the strain of business life and industry, and more recently to 
war-shock. But if we are to accept the results of the latest 
psychological research, the family must receive the lion's share 



THE FAMILY 335 

of blame. The groundwork for fatal ruptures in the adult per- 
sonality is laid in childhood and in the home which produced 
the victim. For many years the discussion of American nerves 
has hinged on the hectic haste of business and industrial life, 
on the noise and bustle and lack of repose in the national 
atmosphere. But we have neglected to accuse the family to its 
face of failing to protect the child against the cataclysms of 
the future while it had the chance. 

The tremendous influence of the family on the individuals, 
old and young, composing it is not merely a pious belief. We 
are, alas, what our families make us. This is not a pleasant 
thought to many individuals who have learned through bitter 
experience to look on family relationships as a form of soul 
imprisonment. Yet it seems to be an incontestable fact that 
personality is first formed — or deformed — in the family con- 
stellation. The home really does the job for which the school, 
the press, the church, and the State later get the credit. It is 
a smoothly articulated course from the cradle onward, however, 
in which the subjugated parent produces a subjugated child, 
not so much by the rod of discipline — which figures very 
little in American family life — but by the more powerful and 
pervasive force of habit and attitude. Parents allow them- 
selves to be a medium for transmitting the incessant pressure 
of standards which allow no room for impulse and initiative; 
they become the willing instrument of a public mania for 
standardization which tries to make every human soul into the 
image of a folded pattern. The babe is moulded in his cradle 
into the man who will drop a sentimental tear, wear a white 
carnation, and send a telegram on Mother's Day — that trav- 
esty of a family festival which shames affection and puts spon- 
taneous feeling to the blush. 

As the family itself grows smaller, this pressure of mechanis- 
tic and conventional standards encroaches more closely upon 
the child. A sizeable group of brothers and sisters create for 
themselves a savage world which is their best protection against 
the civilization that awaits them. But with one or two chil- 
dren, or a widely scattered series, this natural protection is 
lost. The youngster is prematurely assimilated to the adult 
world of parents who are nowadays, owing to later marriage, not 



336 CIVILIZATION 

even quite so young as formerly they were. It is a peculiarity 
of parents, especially of mothers, that they never entertain a 
modest doubt as to whether they might be the best of all pos- 
sible company for their children. And obviously the tired busi- 
ness man cannot properly substitute in the evenings for a rois- 
tering, shouting brother who never came into the world at 
all; nor can all the concentrated care of the most devoted 
mother take the place of the companionship and discipline 
which children get from other children. These considerations 
deserve more attention than they usually receive in connection 
with the falling birth-rate. The figures mean that the environ- 
ment of the young child is being altered in a fundamental re- 
spect. Parents of small families need to take effective steps 
to counteract the loss. Practical things, like nursery schools, 
would be a help. But, chiefly, if parents will insist on being 
companions of their children, they need themselves to under- 
stand and practise the art of common joy and happiness. 

Katharine Anthony 



THE ALIEN 

THE immigrant alien has been discussed by the Anglo- 
Saxon as though he were an Anglo-Saxon " problem," He 
has been discussed by labour as though he were a labour 
" problem "; by interpreters of American institutions as though 
man existed for institutions and for institutions which the class 
interpreting them found advantageous to its class. Occasion- 
ally the alien has been discussed from the point of view of the 
alien and but rarely from the point of view of democracy. The 
" problem " of the alien is largely a problem of setting our own 
house in order. It is the " problem " of Americanizing Amer- 
ica. The outstanding fact of three centuries of immigration 
is that the immigrant alien ceases to be an alien when economic 
conditions are such as properly to assimilate him. 

There is something rather humorous about the way America 
discusses " the alien." For we are all aliens. And what is 
less to our liking we are almost all descended from the peasant 
classes of Europe. We are here because our forebears were 
poor. They did not rule over there. They were oppressed; 
they were often owned. And with but few exceptions they 
came because of their poverty. For the rich rarely emigrate. 
And in the 17th and i8th centuries there was probably a 
smaller percentage of immigrants who could pass the literacy 
test than there are to-day. Moreover^ in the early days only 
suffering could drive the poor of Europe from their poverty. 
For the conditions of travel were hazardous. The death toll 
from disease was very high. It required more fortitude to 
cross the Atlantic and pass by the ring of settlers out onto the 
unbroken frontier than it does to pass Ellis Island and the 
exploiters round about it to-day. 

The immigration question has arisen because America, too, 
has created a master class, a class which owns and employs and 
rules. And the alien in America is faced by a class opinion, 
born of the change which has come over America rather than 

337 



338 CIVILIZATION 

any change in the alien himself. America has changed. The 
alien remains much the same. And the most significant phase 
of the immigration problem is the way we treat the alien and 
the hypocrisy of our discussion of the subject. 

Sociologists have given us a classification of the immigrant 
alien. They speak of the " old immigration " and the " new 
immigration." The former is the immigration of the 1 7th and 
1 8th and the first three-quarters of the 19th centuries. It was 
English, Scotch, Irish, German, Scandinavian with a sprin- 
kling of French, Swiss, and other nationalities. From the be- 
ginning, the preponderance was British. During the i8th cen- 
tury there was a heavy Scotch inflow and during the first half 
of the 19th a heavy Irish and German immigration. The Irish 
came because of the famine of 1848, the Scotch in large part 
because of the enclosure acts and the driving of the people from 
the land to make way for deer preserves and grazing lands for 
the British aristocracy. Most of the British immigration was 
the result of oppressive land laws of one kind or another. The 
population of Ireland was reduced from eight million to slightly 
over four million in three-quarters of a century. The British 
immigrant of the 17th century, like the recent Russian immi- 
gration, was driven from home by economic oppression. Only 
a handful came to escape religious oppression or to secure 
political liberty. The cause of immigration has remained the 
same from the beginning until now. 

The " old immigration " was from the North of Europe. 
It was of Germanic stock. It was predominantly Protestant. 
But the most important fact of all and the fact most usually 
ignored is an economic fact. The early immigrant found a 
broad continent awaiting him, peopled only by Indians. He 
became a free man. He took up a homestead. He ceased to 
belong to any one else. He built for himself. He paid no 
rent, he took no orders, he kept what he produced, and was 
inspired by hope and ambition to develop his powers. It was 
economic, not political, freedom that distinguishes the " old 
immigration " from the " new." 

The " new immigration " is from Southern and Central Eu- 
rope. It is Latin and Slavic. It is largely Catholic. It, too, 
is poor. It, too, is driven out by oppression, mostly economic 



THE ALIEN 339 

and for the most part landed. Almost every wave of immi- 
gration has been in some way related to changes for the worse 
in the landed systems of Europe. Wherever the poverty has 
been the most distressing, there the impulse to move has been 
the strongest. It has been the poverty of Europe that has 
determined our immigration from the 17th century until now. 

The ethnic difference is secondary. So is the religious. 
The fundamental fact that distinguishes the " old immigra- 
tion " from the " new " is economic. The " new immigration " 
works for the " old." It found the free land all taken up. 
The public domain had passed into the hand of the Pacific 
railroads, into great manorial estates. Land thieves had re- 
peated the acts of the British Parliament of the i8th century. 
The Westward movement of peoples that had been going on 
from the beginning of time came to an end when the pioneer 
of the 8o's and 90's found only the bad lands left for settle- 
ment. That ended an era. It closed the land to settlement 
and sent the immigrant to the city. The peasant of Europe 
has become the miner and the mill worker. He left one kind 
of serfdom to take up another. It is this that distinguishes 
the " old immigrant " from the " new." It is this that distin- 
guishes the old America from the Amercia of to-day. And the 
problem of immigration, like the problem of America, is the 
re-establishment of economic democracy. The protective«tariff 
bred exotic industry. The employer wanted cheap labour. 
The mine owners and mill owners combined with the steam- 
ship companies to stimulate immigration. They sent agents 
abroad. They brought in gangs from Southern and Central 
Europe. They herded them in mining camps, in mill towns, 
in the tenements. The closing of the public domain and the 
rise of monopoly industry marks the turning point in immigra- 
tion. It marks the beginning of the immigration " problem." 
It is partly ethnic, but largely economic. 

The " new immigration " from Southern and Central Europe 
began to increase in volume about 1890. It came from South- 
ern rather than Northern Italy, from Poland, Hungary, Bo- 
hemia, Russia, the Balkans, and the Levant. There was a 
sprinkling of Spanish and Portuguese immigrants. In 1914 
South and Central European immigration amounted to 683,000, 



340 CIVILIZATION 

while the North European immigration was but 220,000. Of 
the former 296,000 came from Italy, 123,000 from Poland, 
45,000 from Russia, and 45,000 from Hungary. These figures 
do not include Jewish immigrants, who numbered 138,000. Of 
the North European immigrants 105,000 came from the Brit- 
ish Isles, 80,000 came from Germany, and 36,000 from the 
Scandinavian countries. 

Of the 14,000,000 persons of foreign birth now in the 
country, a very large percentage is of South and Central Euro- 
pean stock. 

We are accustomed to think of the old immigration and the 
new immigration in terms of races and religions. And much 
of the present-day hostility to immigration comes from the 
inexplicable prejudice which has recently sprung up against 
persons of differing races and religions. It is assumed that the 
new immigration is poor and ignorant because it is ethnically 
unfitted for anything different and that it prefers the tenement 
and the mining camp to American standards of living and cul- 
ture. But the newly arrived immigrant goes to the mines and 
the crowded city not from choice but from necessity. He lives 
in colonies with his fellows largely because the employing 
class prefers that he be segregated and has no interest in his 
physical comfort or welfare. The alien has been a commodity, 
not a human being; he has been far cheaper tiian a machine 
because he provided his own capital cost and makes provision 
for his own depreciation and decay. He has been bought in 
the slums of Europe for his passage money and he can be left 
to starve when bad times or industrial power throws him on 
his own resources. The important difference between the " old 
immigration " and the " new immigration " is not ethnic. It 
is not religious. It is economic. The " old immigration " has 
become the owning and employing class, while the " new immi- 
gration " is the servile and dependent class. This is the real, 
the important difference between the " old immigration " and 
the " new." The former owns the resources of America. The 
economic division coincides roughly with the race division. 

When economic privilege becomes ascendant fear is born. It 
is born of a subconscious realization on the part of the privi- 
leged classes that their privileges rest on an unjust if not an 



THE ALIEN 341 

unstable foundation. Fear is the parent of hate, and back of 
other explanations of the present demand for exclusion of the 
alien is fear. It is fear that gave birth to the persecution 
and ruthless official and semi-official activity first against all 
aliens under the White Slave Act and similar laws, next against 
the Germans, and later against the " reds." An economic psy- 
chology born of injustice explains our present attitude toward 
the alien just as a different economic psychology explained our 
attitude during the first two and a half centuries of our life 
when it was the consuming desire of statesmen, real-estate spec- 
ulators, and exploiters to people the continent and develop our 
industries and resources as rapidly as possible. 

The " immigration problem," so called, has always been and 
always will be an economic problem. There are many people 
who feel that there is an inherent superiority in the Anglo- 
Saxon race; that it has a better mind, greater virtue, and a 
better reason for existence and expansion than any other race. 
They insist there are eugenic reasons for excluding immigra- 
tion from South and Central Europe; they would preserve 
America for people of Anglo-Saxon stock. As an immigration 
official I presided over Ellis Island for five years. During this 
time probably a million immigrants arrived at the port of New 
York. They were for the most part poor. They had that in 
common with the early immigrant. They had other qualities 
in common. They were ambitious and filled with hope. They 
were for the most part kindly and moved by the same human 
and domestic virtues as other peoples. And it is to me an 
open question whether the " new immigration," if given a vir- 
gin continent, and the hope and stimulus which springs from 
such opportunity, would not develop the same qualities of mind 
and of character that we assume to be the more or less ex- 
clusive characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon race. There is also 
reason for believing that the warmer temperament, the emo- 
tional qualities, and the love of the arts that characterize the 
South and Central European would produce a race blend, 
under proper economic conditions, that would result in a better 
race than one of pure Northern extraction. For it is to be 
remembered that it was not political liberty, religious liberty, 
or personal liberty that changed the early immigrant of North- 



342 CIVILIZATION 

em Europe into the American of to-day. His qualities were 
born of economic conditions, of a free continent, of land to be 
had for the asking, of equal opportunity with his fellows to 
make his life what he would have it to be. The old immigrant 
recognized no master but himself. He was the equal of his 
neighbours in every respect. He knew no inferiority complex 
born of a servile relationship. It was this rather than our 
constitutions and laws that made the American of the first 
three centuries what he was. It was this alchemy that changed 
the serf of Northern Europe into the self-reliant freeman of 
America. 

The immigration problem was born when this early eco- 
nomic opportunity came to an end. When the free land was 
all gone, the immigrant had to work for somebody else. He 
went to the mines and the city tenement not from the choice 
but from necessity. He took the first job that offered. When 
established he sent for his brother, his neighbour, or his friend. 
He, too, went to the mining camp or the slum. Colonies ap- 
peared. The alien became segregated. He lived by himself. 
And he developed the qualities that would be developed by 
any race under similar conditions. He, too, feared. He was 
known as a Dago, Wop, Hunkie. To him government meant 
a policeman, a health officer^ and an immigration inspector — all 
agencies to be feared. He slowly learned to unionize. He 
came to understand group action. He found in his craft or- 
ganization the only protection against the employers, and in 
the political boss the only protection against agencies that in- 
terfered with his personal and domestic life. The immigrant 
soon learned that our immigration laws were shaped by eco- 
nomic motives. He learned that he was in danger of being 
deported if he did not work. The menace which hangs over 
the immigrant during his early years is the phrase " likely to 
become a public charge." And this alleged reason for depor- 
tation covers a multitude of other excuses which can be used 
as it is used — as a drag-net accusation. So the immigrant 
feels and justly feels that what we want of him is to work, to 
work for some one else, and to accept what is offered and be 
content. For within the last few years the doctrine has be- 
come accepted by him and by the nation as well that the alien 



THE ALIEN 343 

must not complain, he must not be an agitator, he must not 
protest against the established industrial order or the place 
which he occupies within it. This has heightened his fear com- 
plex. It has tended to establish his inferiority relationship. 

Our legislative attitude toward the alien has mirrored the 
economic conditions of the country. Up to about the middle 
of the last century we had no restrictive laws of any kind. 
America was free to all comers. We wanted population. 
Western States pleaded for settlers. They drew them from the 
East as they drew them from Europe. We were hospitable 
to the oppressed. We opened our arms to revolutionary lead- 
ers. We had no fears. Experience had shown that the poorest 
of Europe, even the classified criminals of Europe, would 
quickly Americanize themselves under the stimulus of new 
opportunity in a virgin land where all men were potentially 
equal. For generations there was fear that the American con- 
tinent could never be fully peopled. 

But the free lands were all gone about 1890. The Western 
drift of peoples, which had been in movement since the earliest 
times, came to an end. Population closed in on the Pacific. 
Cities grew with unprecedented rapidity. Factories needed 
men. Employers looked to Europe. They sent agents abroad 
who employed them in gangs. Often they were used to dis- 
place American-born workers. They were used to break up 
labour organizations. The aliens were mixed to prevent them 
organizing. Wages were temporarily at least forced down. 
For some years our immigration policy was shaped by the 
big industrials who combined with the steamship companies to 
induce immigration. 

Organized labour began to protest. It, too, was moved by 
economic motives. It secured the passage of the contract 
labour law, which prevents the landing of any worker for whom 
employment has been provided in advance by an employer. 
Organized labour began to demand restrictive legislation to 
protect its standard of living. But the country was not ready 
for restrictive legislation. Congress instead adopted a selec- 
tive policy. We excluded paupers, the insane and diseased, 
criminals, immoral persons, and those who were likely to be- 
come a public charge. Later we extended the selective idea to 



344 CIVILIZATION 

persons who did not believe in organized government, to 
anarchists, and to persons of revolutionary beliefs. We now 
exclude and deport for opinions as well as for physical and 
mental conditions. The percentage of rejections under these 
selective laws was not great. Of the 1,200,000 aliens who 
came to the country in 1914 only one and one-third per cent, 
were denied admission by the immigration authorities. 

The war stimulated the anti-alien feeling. It provided an 
opportunity for crusades. The press aided the hue and cry. 
In 19 1 5 there was a nation-wide round-up of immoral cases. 
Thousands of prostitutes, of procurers, and of persons guilty 
of some personal irregularity were arrested all over the coun- 
try. Many of them were deported. The demand for restric- 
tive legislation was supported by many different groups. It 
had the backing of organized labour, of the Southern States, 
of many protestant organization and churches. It was strongly 
supported in the West. 

The " literacy test," which went into effect in 191 7, requiring 
of the alien an ability to read some language selected by him, 
was the first restrictive measure enacted. Its purpose was to 
check the South and Central European inflow. For in these 
countries illiteracy is very high. It rises as high as sixty 
and seventy per cent, in the Central European states. With 
the test of literacy applied it was felt that the old immigration 
from Northern Europe would reassert itself. Our industrial 
needs would be supplied from Great Britain, from Germany 
and from the Scandinavian countries. The same motive un- 
derlies the recently enacted law which arbitrarily fixes the 
number who may come in any one year from any one country 
to three per cent, of the aliens already here from that country. 
This will still further shift the immigration to the Northern 
countries, and if continued as the permanent policy of the Gov- 
ernment will insure a predominant Anglo-Saxon-Germanic- 
Scandinavian stock as the racial stock of America. 

Despite all of the Congressional concern over the alien and 
the recent nation-wide movement for his Americanization, there 
has never been any official concern for the alien, for his pro- 
tection from exploitation and abuse, or any attempt to work 
out a policy of real Americanization. Not that the task is 



THE ALIEN 345 

impossible. Not that it is even experimental. Australia, 
Brazil, and Canada have more or less well-developed agencies 
for aiding the alien on landing, for protecting him until he is 
able to protect himself, and for adjusting him as speedily as 
possible to new conditions of life. In all of these countries 
the aim of the government is to give the immigrant a stake 
in the land, to bring about his permanent residence in the 
country, and, if possible, to induce him to become a farmer 
rather than an industrial worker. This has not been done by 
agencies of distribution alone, but by conscious selection in the 
country from which the immigrant comes, by grants of land 
to those who are ready to take up land holdings, and by the 
extension of credit from state agencies to enable the settlers 
to stock and equip their farms. The policy of Brazil has 
been so successful that many colonies of Northern Italians 
have been induced to settle there who have become prosperous 
and contented farmers. In other words, these countries have 
consciously aimed to work out a continuing policy similar to 
that which prevailed in this country up to about 1890 when 
the immigrant drifted naturally to the land as a means of se- 
curing the freedom from the exploiting class that had driven 
him from Europe. 

It is not to be inferred that our policy of hands off the alien 
after his landing has worked only evil. Viewed in the per- 
spective of two centuries, it has worked amazingly well. The 
rapidity with which practically all immigrants rise in the world 
in spite of the obstacles of poverty, illiteracy, and unfamiharity 
with our language is little short of a miracle. This is true of 
the older generation as it is of the younger. It is most true 
in the cities, least true in the mining camps and smaller indus- 
trial centres about the steel mills and slaughter houses where 
the tyranny of the employing class is most pronounced. For 
the newcomer speedily acquires the wants of those with whom 
he associates. He becomes dissatisfied with his shack. He 
demands more and better food and clothes. He almost always 
wants his children to have a schooling and to rise in the scale, 
which to him means getting out of the hod-carrying, day-labour, 
or even artisan class. And the next generation does rise. It 
rises only less rapidly than did the early immigrant. It in- 



346 CIVILIZATION 

creases its wants and demands. It finds the trades union a 
weapon with which it can combat the employer who seeks to 
bring about a confusion of tongues, a confusion of religion, 
and a confusion of races as a means of maintaining the open 
shop. As an evidence of this, the Amalgamated Clothing 
Workers of America is almost exclusively Jewish, Italian, and 
Latin in its membership. It is the most intelligent, the most 
social-minded, and the most highly developed labour organiza- 
tion in the country. The coal miners are largely men of for- 
eign birth. They, too, have adopted an advanced social pro- 
gramme. The alien has found the trades union the most effi- 
cient if not the only agency through which he can Americanize 
himself. And in Americanizing himself he is merely doing 
what the aliens of earlier centuries who preceded him have 
done — he is seeking for economic freedom from a master class. 

America is a marvellous demonstration of the economic 
foundations of all life. It is a demonstration of what hap- 
pens to men when economic opportunities call forth their re- 
sourcefulness and latent ability on one hand and when the 
State, on the other, keeps its hands off them in their personal 
relationships. For the alien quickly adopts a higher standard 
of culture as he rises in the industrial scale, while his morals, 
whatever they may have been, quickly take on the colour of 
his new environment, whatever that may be. And if all of 
the elements which should enter into a consideration of the 
subject were included, I am of the opinion it would be found 
that the morals, the prevalence of vice and crime among the 
alien population is substantially that of the economic class in 
which he is found rather than the race from which he springs. 
In other words, the alleged prevalence of crime among the alien 
population is traceable to poverty and bad conditions of living 
rather than to ethnic causes, and in so far as it exists it tends 
disappear as the conditions which breed it pass away. 

Despite the fact that our hands-off policy of the past has 
worked amazingly well, the time has come when it must be 
changed. Not because of any change in the character of the 
alien, but because of the change which has taken place in our 
own internal life. Economic conditions make it impossible for 
the alien, as it does for the native born, to become a farmer. 



THE ALIEN 347 

Exploiting agencies are making it difficult and often impossible 
for the farmer to make a living. Land speculation has shot 
up the price of farm land to prohibitive figures. The railroads 
and middle men and banking agencies are putting the American 
farmer into a semi-servile status. He is unable to market his 
crop after it is produced or he markets it at a figure that ulti- 
mately reduces him to bankruptcy. The immigration problem 
remains an economic problem. It has become an American 
problem. The policy we should adopt for Americanizing the 
alien is a policy we should adopt for our own people as well, for 
when economic opportunity came to an end for our own people, 
it created not only an immigration problem, but a domestic 
problem. The solution of one is the solution of the other. 

The alien will Americanize himself if he is given the oppor- 
tunity to do so. The bird of passage will cease to migrate 
when he possesses a stake in the land of his adoption. The 
best cure for Bolshevism is not deportation but a home, a farm, 
a governmental policy of land settlement. A constructive im- 
migration policy and Americanization policy is one that will: 

1. Direct the alien as well as the native born to opportuni- 
ties of employment and especially to agencies that will enable 
them to become home owners and farm owners; 

2. Provide government grants, as is done in Australia, Den- 
mark, and some of the South American countries, to which the 
would-be farmer or home owner can go for financial assistance. 
In Denmark and Australia any man who shows aptitude and 
desire for farming and who is able to satisfy a local commission 
of his abilities, can secure a small farm in a farm colony, fully 
equipped for planting. The grant includes a house and barn, 
some cattle and machinery, and sufficient capital to carry the 
settler over the first season. The applicant must provide a 
certain portion of the initial outlay himself. He is aided by 
experts from the colony, he is advised as to what to plant and 
how to care for his cattle. His produce is marketed co- 
operatively, while much of the machinery is owned either by 
the community or by co-operative agencies identified with the 
community. The land is purchased in large tracts by the 
State in advance of settlement to prevent speculation, while 
settlers are required to develop their holdings. They may 



348 CIVILIZATION 

not purchase for speculative purposes. The State of Denmark 
has planted thousands of home-owning farmers in this way and 
has all but ended farm tenancy in a generation's time. The 
farm tenant and farm labourer have become owners. A simi- 
lar policy has been developed in Australia, where millions of 
dollars have been advanced by the State to settlers. In both 
of these countries the land settlement colonies have been a 
great success. There have been few failures and no losses to 
the State. 

3. The savings of the alien should be used for the benefit 
of the alien. Hundreds of millions of dollars leave this country 
annually in the form of remittances. Much of it goes abroad 
because of fear of American banks. Many millions more are 
in hiding for the same reason. The deposits in the Postal 
Savings banks are largely the deposits of the immigrant. They 
are turned over to the National banks and find their way into 
commercial activities. If these funds were mobilized in co- 
operative banks, as is done all over Europe, or if the Gov- 
ernment would dedicate them to a revolving fund for aiding 
persons to build homes, to buy farms, and to aid the alien with 
credit, which he now has no means of securing; he would be 
lured from the city to the land, he would become a home and 
farm owner rather than an industrial worker, and would rap- 
idly develop those qualities of mind and character that are asso- 
ciated in our minds with the early Anglo-Saxon settler but 
which are rather the qualities which spring up of themselves 
when the economic conditions encourage them. 

4. Our deportation laws are a disgrace to any country. 
They are an adaptation of the fugitive slave laws. The offend- 
ing alien is subject to lynch law sanctioned by the State. He 
is arrested on complaint by an inspector. He is then tried by 
the man who arrests him. His friends and relatives are ex- 
cluded from the trial. The judge who made the arrest is often 
the interpreter and the clerk who transcribes the testimony. 
He also is his jailer. He can and does hold the alien incom- 
municado. Often the alien scarcely knows why he has been 
arrested. Often he does not understand the testimony. The 
local findings have to be approved at Washington by the De- 
partment pf Labour. But the approval is by a clerk who, like 



THE ALIEN 349 

the inspector, often wants to make a record. The opportunity 
for collusion with police, with crusaders, with employers, with 
Chambers of Commerce, and with organization bent on " rid- 
ding the country of disturbers " is manifest. Often men are 
arrested, tried, convicted, and possibly placed on ships for their 
home countries before their families are aware of what has 
happened to them. 

The alien is denied every protection of our constitution. 
The Bill of Rights does not apply to him. He has no present- 
ment before a Grand Jury, there is no jury trial, he rarely has 
counsel, and he is often held incommunicado by the official 
who has taken him into custody and who wants to justify his 
arrest. The only recourse the alien has is the writ of habeas 
corpus. But this is of practically no avail. For the courts 
have held that if there is a scintilla of evidence on which the 
inspector could act the court will not review the finding. And 
a scintilla is any evidence at all. When to this is added the 
fact that the charge " likely to become a public charge " has 
come to cover almost any condition that might arise, and as 
this charge is usually added to the others as a recourse on which 
the inspector may fall back, the chance of relief in the court 
is practically nil. Under the laws as they now exist the alien 
is a man without a country. He has no protection from the 
constitution and little protection under the laws. The alien 
knows this. He feels that he is defenceless. American liberty 
to him means the liberty of a policeman, a health or school 
official, an immigration inspector, and agents of the department 
of justice to invade his home, to seize his papers, to arrest 
without warrant, to hold incommunicado, and to deport on a 
charge that is often as foreign to the facts as anything could be. 

It is this more than anything else that has embittered the 
alien towards America during the last few years. It is this 
that makes him feel that he is not wanted here. It is this that 
is sending hundreds of thousands back to Europe, many of them 
among the best of the aliens and many of them worthy in 
every way of our confidence and welcome. 

A proper immigration policy should be a national policy. 
Not something for the alien alone but for our own people. 
For the immigration problem is merely another form of the 



350 CIVILIZATION 

domestic problem. When we are ready to settle the one we 
will settle the other. A cross section of one branch of our 
political State is a cross section of another. The alien of 
to-day is not very different from the alien of yesterday. He 
has the same instincts and desires as did those who came in 
the Mayflower. Only those who came in the Mayflower made 
their own laws and their own fortunes. Those who come to- 
day have their laws made for them by the class that employs 
them and they make their own fortunes only as those aliens 
who came first permit them to do so. 

Frederic C. Howe 



RACIAL MINORITIES 

"... not to laugh at the actions of men, nor yet to deplore or 
detest them, but simply to understand them." — Spinoza. 

IN America, the race-problem is not only without answer; 
thus far it is even without formulation. In- the face of ordi- 
nary economic, political, and religious difficulties, people habit- 
ually formulate creeds which give a kind of rhyme and reason 
to their actions; but where inter-racial relations are concerned, 
the leaders go pussy-footing all around the fundamental ques- 
tion, while the emotions of the masses translate themselves 
into action, and action back again into emotion, with less con- 
sideration of means and ends than one expects of the maddest 
bomb-thrower. Everybody has some notion of the millennial 
aims of the Communist Party, the National Association of 
Manufacturers, the W.C.T.U., the Holy Rollers; but what 
are the Southerners getting at, when they educate the Negro, 
and refuse him the ballot; what ultimate result does the North 
expect from the granting of the franchise and the denial of 
social equality? Do both the North and the South hope to 
maintain a permanent racial division of the country's popula- 
tion? If so, are the Indians, the Jews and the Asiatics to be 
classed with the Negroes, as unassimilable minorities? How 
is the conduct of the American majority suited to this aim, 
if it is an aim? How can permanent division be maintained, 
except by permanent prejudice? What do the racial liberators, 
ameliorators, uplifters, and general optimists think about it; 
or do they think about it at all? 

From the moment of initial contact between the mass of 
the American population and the country's most important 
racial minorities — the Indian, the Jew, the Oriental, and the 
Negro — the self-congratulatory feelings of the majority have 
always found a partial or complete counterpart everjrwhere 
except among the slaves and the children of the slaves. The 

3'5i 



352 CIVILIZATION 

long delay in the inception of All-Africanism in America, and 
the groping uncertainty which still characterizes its manifes- 
tations, are due in large part to the cultural youthfulness of 
the American Negro. Biologically, the black race was ma- 
tured in Africa; culturally it had made considerable advances 
there, before the days of the slave-trade. The process of en- 
slavement could not strip away the physical characteristics 
of the race, but in all that has to do with cultural life and 
social inheritance, the Negro was re-born naked in the new 
world. 

When one compares the condition of the Negro with that 
of the other three racial minorities at the moment of contact 
with the miscellaneous white population, the Indian seems 
closer to the Jew and the Oriental than to the slave. In a 
general way, the condition of the Indian tribes resembled that 
of the Negroes in Africa, but the Indians were left in pos- 
session of most of the elements of savage culture and were 
never entirely deprived of the means of maintaining them- 
selves in this stage of development. Needless to say, the Jews 
and the Orientals were in still better case than the 
Indians, for their imported cultural equipment was far more 
elaborate and substantial, and their economic position much 
better. 

The four racial minorities thus varied widely in the degree 
of their self-sufficiency, and likewise, inversely, in the degree 
of their need for absorption into the current of American life. 
Quite obviously the Negro was least independent and most in 
need of assimilation. However, the necessity of the alien group 
has not been the only factor of importance in this matter of 
assimilation. Each of the minorities has been from the begin- 
ning subjected to the prejudice of the majority, and that group 
which first lost all life of its own through contact with the 
whites has been signalled out for the maximum amount of 
persecution. 

The standard explanation or excuse for race-prejudice is 
the theory of the inequality of racial stocks. However, for 
all their eagerness to bolster up a foregone conclusion, the 
race-patriots have not been able to prove by any sort of evi- 
dence, historical, biological, or psychological, that racial dif- 



RACIAL MINORITIES 353 

ferences are not simply indications of unlikeness, rather than 
of inherent superiority or inferiority. The anthropologists 
are pretty well agreed that physical differences divide mankind 
into three major groups, European (including the Jews), 
Mongoloid (including the American Indians), and Negroid; 
but science has set no definite limit to the respective potentiali- 
ties of these groups. In other words, it has remained for race- 
prejudice to assume an unproved inferiority, and to devise 
all possible measures for making the life of the objectionable 
races exactly what it would be, in the absence of interference, 
if the assumed inferiority were real. 

To accept the term " race-prejudice " as accurately descrip- 
tive of the feelings to which it is usually applied, is to assume 
that these feelings originate in race-differences, if not in the 
inequality of races. This, however, is still to be proved. 
Race-differences are a factor of the situation wherever two 
races are in contact, but it is a matter of common knowledge 
that the members of two or more racial groups sometimes in- 
termingle on terms of greatest friendliness. To attribute 
" race-prejudice " to race-difference, and to leave race-friend- 
liness entirely unexplained, is to blind oneself deliberately to 
the existence of variable causes which alone can account for 
the variable results that appear in the presence of racial 
constants. Racial inequality of intelligence, if it actually 
exists, is simply one of a number of ever-present race- 
differences, and in all these differences taken together one can 
find no adequate explanation of the variable phenomenon com- 
monly called " race-prejudice," but so designated here only for 
the sake of convenience. 

Any serious attempt to get at the non-racial causes of " race- 
prejudice " in America would necessarily involve the compari- 
son, point by point, of economic, social, political, and intel- 
lectual conditions in various localities in the United States 
with corresponding local conditions in other countries where 
the races here in conflict are more nearly at peace. In the 
present state of knowledge, the racial theory of race-prejudice 
is demonstrably inadequate, while the non-racial theory is an 
hypothesis which can neither be proved nor disproved. Such 
being the case, the haphazard speculations which follow are 



354 CIVILIZATION 

not offered as a proof of this hypothesis, or as an explanation 
of the existence of race-prejudice in America, but simply as a 
stimulus to inquiry. 

Beginning with these speculations, it may be said that the 
goods and opportunities of the material life, unlike those of the 
intellectual life, are frequently incapable of division without 
loss to the original possessor. On this account, competition 
is likely to be particularly keen and vindictive where material 
interests are given the foremost place. It is also perhaps 
safe to say that the long preoccupation of the American ma- 
jority with the development of its material inheritance has 
brought to the majority a heavy heritage of materialism. One 
may hazard the statement that the prejudice of America's native 
white majority against the Negroes, the Indians, the Jews and 
the Asiatics, is now and has always been in some sense attrib- 
utable and proportional to the majority's fear of some action 
on the part of the minority which might injure the material 
interests of the majority; while the only race-differences which 
have had any real importance are those superficial ones which 
serve to make the members of the minorities recognizable at 
sight. At any rate, an examination of some of the facts that 
come most easily to hand shows an interesting coincidence 
between the prejudice of the majority and the power of the 
minority. 

Before the Civil War, the structure of Southern society was 
bottomed on slavery, and the fear of any humanization of 
the Negro which would make him appear worthy of emanci- 
pation was strong enough to arouse any degree of prejudice, 
and any amount of repression. The prejudice of the Southern 
white populace as a whole reached its maximum intensity when 
emancipation threatened to place the blacks in permanent po- 
litical and economic control of certain portions of the South. 
Even to-day, fear of the political power of the Negroes, and 
perhaps also the over-emphasized fear of black " outrages," 
still acts upon the white population as a unifying force; but 
in spite of this fact, class-interests have become plainly visible. 
When Black Republicanism had once been driven to cover, the 
masters set about rebuilding their privileges upon the founda- 
tion of Negro labour which is still their chief support. Only 



RACIAL MINORITIES 355 

a few Negroes have been able to compete directly for a share 
in these privileges, and accordingly most of the fears of the 
well-to-do people of the South are anticipatory rather than 
immediate. 

With the " poor whites," the case is altogether different. 
Here there is no question of keeping the Negro in his place, 
for ever since the Emancipation the place of the Negro has 
been very much that of the poor white himself, at least in so, 
far as economic status is concerned. In the view of the white 
labourer, the Negro rises too high the moment he becomes a 
competitor for a job, and every Negro is potentially just that. 
Accordingly, the prejudice of the poorer whites is bitter and 
indiscriminate, and is certainly not tending to decrease with 
the cityward drift of the Negro population. 

With the appearance of Negro workers in large numbers in 
Northern industrial centres, race-prejudice has begun to mani- 
fest itself strongly among the white workers. The Northern 
masters have, however, shown little tendency to reproduce 
the sentiments of their Southern peers, for in the North there 
is no fear of political dominance by the blacks, and a supply 
of cheap labour is as much appreciated as it is south of the 
Line. 

In spite of the fact that the proportion of Negroes in the 
total population of the United States has declined steadily from 
15.7 per cent, in 1850 to 9.9 per cent, in 1920, the attitude of 
both Northerners and Southerners is somewhat coloured by 
the fear that the blacks will eventually overrun the country. 
If prejudice had no other basis than this, there would perhaps 
be no great difficulty in effecting its cure. As a matter of 
course, immigration accounts in part for the increasing pre- 
dominance of the white population; but this hardly disposes 
of the fact that throughout the South, during the years 1890- 
19 10, the percentage of native whites of native parentage ad- 
vanced in both urban and rural communities. Discussion of 
comparative birth-rates also gives rise to numerous alarums 
and excursions, but the figures scarcely justify the fears ex- 
pressed. Statistics show that, in spite of the best efforts of 
the people who attempt to hold the black man down, and then 
fear him all the more because he breeds too generously, the 



356 CIVILIZATION 

improvement in the material condition of the Negro is operat- 
ing inevitably to check the process of multiplication. 

If the case of the Negro is complicated in the extreme, that 
of the Indian is comparatively simple. Here race-prejudice 
has always followed the frontier. As long as the Indian inter- 
fered with the exploitation of the country, the pioneers feared 
him, and disliked him cordially. Their feelings worked them- 
selves out in all manner of personal cruelty, as well as in a 
process of wholesale expropriation, but as soon as the tribes 
had been cooped up on reservations, the white man's dislike 
for the Indian began to cool off perceptibly. From the be- 
ginning, the Indian interfered with expansion, not as an eco- 
nomic competitor, but as a military enemy; when the dread 
of him as a fighter disappeared, there was no new fear to take 
its place. During the years 1910 to 1920 the Indian popula- 
tion actually decreased 8.6 per cent. 

If the Indian has neither shared the privileges nor paid the 
price of a generous participation in American life, the Jew 
has certainly done both. In every important field of activity, 
the members of this minority have proved themselves quite 
able to compete with the native majority, and accordingly 
the prejudice against them is not confined to any one social 
class, but is concentrated rather in those regions where the 
presence of Jews in considerable numbers predicates their 
competitive contact with individuals of all classes. Although 
as a member of one branch of the European racial family, 
the Jew is by no means so definitely distinguished by physical 
characteristics as are the members of the other minorities 
here under discussion, it is nevertheless true that when the 
Jew has been identified by his appearance, or has chosen to 
identify himself, the anti-Semite takes on most of the airs of 
superiority which characterize the manifestations of prejudice 
towards the other minorities. Nevertheless, the ordinary run 
of anti-Semitic talk contains frequent admissions of jealousy 
and fear, and it is safe to say that one must look chiefly to 
such emotions, as intensified by the rapid increase of the 
Jewish population from 1,500,000 in 1906 to 3,300,000 in 
191 8, rather than to the heritage of European prejudice, for an 
explanation of the growth of anti-Semitism in America. The 



RACIAL MINORITIES 357 

inclusion of anti-Semitism with the other types of race- 
prejudice here under discussion follows naturally enough from 
the fact that the Jew is thought of as primarily a Jew, what- 
ever the country of his origin may have been, while the Slav, 
for instance, is popularly regarded as a Russian, a Pole, a Serb 
— a national rather than a racial alien. 

Like the Jew, the Oriental has come into the United States 
as a " foreigner," as well as a member of an alien race. The 
absence of this special disqualification has not particularly 
benefitted the Negro and the Indian, but its presence in the 
case of the Japanese has been of considerable service to the 
agitators. The prevalent dislike and fear of the new Japan 
as a world-power has naturally coloured the attitude of the 
American majority toward the Japanese settlers in this coun- 
try; but this in itself hardly explains why the Calif ornians, 
who were burning Chinamen out of house and home in the 
'seventies, are now centring their prejudice upon the Japanese 
agriculturist. The fact is that since the passage of the Ex- 
clusion Laws the Chinese population of the United States has 
fallen off more than 40 per cent., and the importance of 
Chinese competition has decreased accordingly, while on the 
other hand the number of Japanese increased 53.9 per cent, 
between 1910 and 1920, and the new competitors are showing 
themselves more than a match for the white farmers. With a 
frankness that neither Negrophobia nor anti-Semitism has 
made us familiar with, many of the Californians have rested 
their case against the Japanese on an economic foundation, and 
have confessed that they are unable to compete with the 
Japanese on even terms. As a matter of course, there is the 
usual flow of talk about the inferiority of the alien race, but 
the fear of competition, here so frankly admitted, would be 
enough in itself to account for this new outbreak of " race- 
prejudice." 

When one considers thus the course that prejudice has taken 
in the case of the Negro, the Indian, the Jew, and the Oriental, 
it begins to appear that this sentiment may wax and wane and 
change about astonishingly in the presence of racial factors 
that remain always the same. Such being the case, one is 
led to wonder what the attitude of the native majority would 



358 CIVILIZATION 

be, if the minorities were recognizable simply as groups, but 
not as racial groups. In other words, what would be the 
result if the racial factor were reduced simply to recogniza- 
bility? The question has a more than speculative interest. 

If the causes of race-prejudice lie quite beyond the reach 
of any simple explanation, the manifestation of this prejudice 
on the part of the American majority are perhaps capable of 
an analysis which will render the whole situation somewhat 
more comprehensible. By and large, and with all due allow- 
ance for exceptions, it may be said that, in its more familiar 
manifestations, race-prejudice takes a direction exactly oppo- 
site to that taken by prejudice against the ordinary immigrant 
of European stock; in the former case, a conscious effort is 
made to magnify the differences between the majority and the 
minority, while in the latter, a vast amount of energy is ex- 
pended in the obliteration of these differences. Thus race- 
prejudice aspires to preserve and even to increase that degree 
of unlikeness which is its excuse for being, while alien-prejudice 
works itself out of a job, by " Americanizing " the immigrant 
and making him over into an unrecognizable member of the 
majority. On one hand, enforced diversity remains as a 
source of friction, while on the other, enforced uniformity is 
demanded as the price of peace. 

Although no purpose can be served by cataloguing here 
all the means employed in the South to keep the black man in 
his place, a few examples may be cited, in order to show the 
scope of these measures of repression. In the economic field, 
there is a pronounced tendency to restrict Negro workers to 
the humblest occupations, and in the agricultural areas the 
system of peonage or debt-slavery is widely employed for the 
purpose of attaching Negro families to the soil. Residence- 
districts are regularly segregated, Jim Crow regulations are 
everywhere in force, and inter-racial marriages are prohibited 
by law in all the States of the South. The administration of 
justice is in the hands of white judges and white juries, and 
the Negro's chances in such company are notoriously small. 
In nearly one-fourth of the counties of the South, the popula- 
tion is half, or more than half black, but the denial of the 



RACIAL MINORITIES 359 

ballot excludes the Negroes from local, State, and national 
political activities. In religious organizations, segregation is 
the invariable rule. Theatres and even public libraries are 
regularly closed to the Negro, and in every State in the South 
segregation in schools is prescribed by law. Some idea of 
the significance of the latter provision may be drawn from 
O. G. Ferguson's study of white and Negro schools in Vir- 
ginia. In this comparatively progressive State, the general 
rating of the white schools is 40.8, as against 22.3 for the 
coloured schools, the latter figure being seven points lower 
than the lowest general rating for any State in the Union. 

Such are some of the legal, extra-legal, and illegal manifes- 
tations of that prejudice which finds its supreme expression in 
the activities of the lynching-mob and the Ku Klux Klan. 
There is still a considerable annual output of lynchings in this 
country (in 1920 the victims numbered sixty-five, of whom fifty 
were Negroes done to death in the South), but the casualty-list 
for the South and for the country as a whole has decreased 
steadily and markedly since 1889, and the proportion of Negro 
victims who were accused of rape or attacks on women has also 
decreased, from 31.8 per cent, in 1889-1893 to 19.8 per cent, 
in 1914-1918. 

On the other hand, the Ku Klux Klan has now re-commenced 
its ghost-walking activities under the command of an " Im- 
perial Wizard " who claims that he has already enlisted 100,000 
followers in the fight to maintain the " God-ordained " pre- 
eminence of the Anglo-Saxon race in America. Other state- 
ments from the lips of the Wizard seem to indicate that his 
organization is not only anti-African, but anti-Semitic, anti- 
Catholic, and anti-Bolshevik as well. Indeed, the bearers of 
the fiery cross seem bent upon organizing an all-American hate 
society, and the expansion of the Klan in the North is already 
under way. 

However, the Klansmen might have succeeded in carrying 
the war into the enemy's country even without adding new 
prejudices to their platform. There has always been some 
feeling against the Negro in the North, and the war-time mi- 
gration of the blacks to Northern industrial centres certainly 
has not resulted in any diminution of existing prejudice. The 



36b CIVILIZATION 

National Urban League estimates that the recent exodus from 
Dixie has produced a net increase of a quarter of a million in 
the coloured population of twelve cities above the Line. This 
movement has brought black and white workers into com- 
petition in many industries where Negroes have hitherto been 
entirely unknown, and frequently the relations between the 
two groups have been anything but friendly. Since about half 
the " internationals " affiliated with the American Federation 
of Labour still refuse to accept Negro members, the unions 
themselves are in no small part to blame for the use that em- 
ployers have made of Negro workers as strike-breakers. 

In twelve Northern and Western States there are laws on the 
statute-books prohibiting marriage between whites and blacks. 
Jim Crow regulations are not in force north of Maryland, but 
in most of the cities there has been a continuous effort to main- 
tain residential segregation, and the practice of discrimination 
in hotels and restaurants is the rule rather than the exception. 
Lynchings are infrequent, but the great riots of Washington 
and Chicago were not exactly indicative of good feeling be- 
tween the races. One situation which revealed a remarkable 
similarity of temper between the North and the South was that 
which arose in the army during the war. It is notorious that 
Northerners in uniform fell in easily with the Southern spirit, 
and gave all possible assistance in an energetic Jim-Crowing of 
the Negroes of Michigan and the Negroes of Mississippi, from 
the first day of their service right through to the last. 

The treatment of the Negro in literature and on the stage 
also reveals an unconscious but all the more important 
unanimity of opinion. It is true the North has produced no 
Thomas Dixons, but it is also true that the gentle and unas- 
suming Uncle Tom of Northern song and story is none other 
than the Uncle Remus whom the South loves so much. In 
Boston, as in Baton Rouge, the Negro who is best liked is the 
loyal, humble, and not too able mammie or uncle of the good 
old days before the war. If an exception be made in the case 
of Eugene O'Neill's " Emperor Jones," it may be said that 
American literature has not yet cast a strong, upstanding black 
man for any other role than that of beast and villain. 

And yet all these forms of discrimination and repression are 



RACIAL MINORITIES 361 

not fully expressive of the attitude of the white population. 
The people of the South are fully sensible of the necessity 
of keeping the Negro in his place; still they do not keep 
him from attending school. Educational facilities, of a sort, 
are provided, however reluctantly, and in half the States of 
the South school attendance is even made compulsory by laws 
(which may or may not be enforced). The schooling is not 
of a kind that will fit the Negroes for the permanent and con- 
tented occupancy of a servile position. Generally speaking, 
the coloured children do not receive a vocational education that 
will keep them in their place, but an old-style three-R training 
that prepares for nothing but unrest. If unrest leads to 
urbanization, the half-hearted education of the Negro perhaps 
serves the interests of the new industrialists; but these indus- 
trial employers are so few in number that their influence can- 
not outweigh that of the planters who lose their peons, and the 
poor whites who find the Negro with one grain of knowledge 
a somewhat more dangerous competitor than the Negro with 
none. Hence there is every reason to believe that if the white 
South had rationalized this situation, the Negro would be as 
ruthlessly excluded from the school as he now is from the 
ballot-box. In fact, the education of the Negro seems quite 
inconsistent with race-prejudice as it is generally preached 
and practised in the South. 

In the North there is no discrimination in the schools, and 
black children and white are put through the same mill. In 
the industrial field, prejudice cannot effectually close to the 
Negroes all those openings which are created by general eco- 
nomic conditions, and in politics the Northern Negro also finds 
some outlet for his energies. 

While it would be quite impossible to show that the existence 
of these miscellaneous educational, industrial, and political 
opportunities is due to any general desire upon the part of the 
members of the white majority to minimize the differences be- 
tween themselves and the Negroes, it is certainly true that this 
desire exists in a limited section of the white population. At 
the present time, white friends of the Negro are actively en- 
gaged in efforts to eliminate certain legal and illegal forms of 
discrimination and persecution, and are giving financial sup- 



362 CIVILIZATION 

port to much of the religious work and most of the private 
educational institutions among the blacks. The Inter-racial 
Committee of the War Work Council of the Y.M.C.A. has 
listed thirty-three social and economic agencies, and twenty- 
three religious agencies, in which members of both races are 
working co-operatively. It must be admitted, however, that 
many, if not most, of the white participants in work of this 
sort are affected by race-prejudice to the extent that they desire 
simply to ameliorate the lowly condition of the Negro, with- 
out altogether doing away with a certain wholesome degree of 
racial segregation. For the complete elimination of the flavour 
of condescension, one must usually seek out those extreme 
sociaHst and syndicalist agitators who preach political or non- 
political class-organization, as a substitute for the familiar 
national and racial groupings. 

In the case of the American Indian, the prejudice and self- 
interest of the white majority have placed the emphasis on 
geographic rather than social segregation. Here the demand 
of the whites has been for land rather than for labour, and 
by consequence servility has never been regarded as a prime 
virtue of Indian character. 

If the early white settlers had so desired, they of course 
could have enslaved a considerable portion of the Indian popu- 
lation, just as the Spaniards did, in regions farther to the 
southward. However, the Americans chose to drive the In- 
dians inland, and to replace them in certain regions with 
African tribesmen who in their native state had been perhaps 
as war-like as the Indians themselves. Thus in the natural 
course of events the African warrior was lost in the slave, while 
the Indian chief continued to be the military opponent rather 
than the economic servant of exploitation, and eventually 
gained romantic interest by virtue of this fact. The nature 
of this operation of debasement on one hand, and ennoble- 
ment on the other, is plainly revealed in American literature. 
The latter phase of the work is carried forward to-day with 
great enthusiasm by the Camp Fire Girls and the Boy Scouts, 
whose devotion to the romantic ideal of Indian life is nowhere 
paralleled by a similar interest in African tribal lore. 

If the Indian has been glorified by remote admirers, he has 



\ 



RACIAL MINORITIES 363 

also been cordially disliked by some of his nearest neighbours, 
and indeed the treatment he has received at the hands of the 
Government seems to reflect the latter attitude rather than 
the former. In theory, most of the Indian reservations are 
still regarded as subject principalities, and the Indians con- 
fined within their boundaries are almost entirely cut off from 
the economic, social, and pohtical life of the neighbouring 
white communities. Many of the tribes still receive yearly 
governmental grants of food, clothing, arms, and ammunition, 
but these allowances only serve to maintain them in a condi- 
tion of dependence, without providing any means of exit from 
it. In justice it should be said, however, that the Govern- 
ment has declared an intention to make the Indian self- 
supporting, and accordingly it restricts the grants, in principle, 
to the old and the destitute. Several States have shown their 
complete sympathy with the system of segregation by enacting 
laws prohibiting the inter-marriage of Indians and whites. 

On the other hand, the mental and moral Americanization of 
the red man has been undertaken by Protestant and Catholic 
missions, and more recently by Government schools. The 
agencies of the latter sort are especially systematic in their 
work of depriving the Indian of most of the qualities for which 
he has been glorified in romance, as well as those for which 
he has been disliked by his neighbours. Many a Western town 
enjoys several times each year the spectacle of Indian school- 
boys in blue uniforms and Indian school-girls in pigtails and 
pinafores, marching in military formation through its streets. 
As long as these marchers are destined for a return to the 
reservation, the townsmen can afford to look upon them with 
mild curiosity. The time for a new adjustment of inter-racial 
relations will not come until the procession turns towards the 
white man's job on the farm and in the factory — if it ever 
does turn that way. 

Attention has already been called toi the fact that the 
Jewish immigrant normally marches from the dock directly 
to the arena of economic competition. Accordingly his prog- 
ress is not likely to be at any time the object of mere curiosity. 
On the other hand, the manifestations of prejudice against the 
Jew have been less aggressive and much less systematic than 



364 CIVILIZATION 

those repressive activities which affect the other minorities. 
Where anti-Semitism is present in America, it seems to ex- 
press itself almost entirely in social discrimination, in the nar- 
row sense. On the other hand, economic, political, and edu- 
cational opportunities are opened to the Jews with a certain 
amount of reluctance. A major exception to this rule of dis- 
crimination must be made in the case of those socialists, syn- 
dicalists and trade-unionists who have diligently sought the 
support of the Jewish workers. 

The Chinaman has also some friends now among the people 
who once regarded him as the blackest of villains. Indeed, 
the Californian's attitude toward the Orientals has in it an 
element of unconscious irony which somewhat illuminates the 
character of the race-problem. The average Easterner will 
perhaps be surprised to learn that in Western eyes the China- 
man is an inferior, of course, but nevertheless an honest man, 
noted for square dealing and the prompt payment of his debts, 
while the Jap is a tricky person whom one should never trust 
on any account. 

In California the baiting of the Japanese is now almost 
as much a part of political electioneering as is the abuse of 
the Negro in the South. The Native Sons of the Golden West 
and the American Legion have gone on record in determined 
opposition to any expansion of Japanese interests in Cali- 
fornia, while the Japanese Exclusion League is particularly 
active in trouble-making propaganda. Economic discrimina- 
tion has taken statutory form in the Alien Land Laws of 1913 
and 1920; discriminatory legislation of the same general type 
has been proposed in Texas and Oregon; a bill providing for 
educational segregation has been presented for a second time 
at Sacramento; Congress has been urged to replace the " gen- 
tlemen's agreement " with an absolute prohibition of Japanese 
immigration; and there is even a demand for a constitutional 
amendment which will deny citizenship to the American-born 
children of aliens who are themselves ineligible for naturaliza- 
tion. The method of legislation is perhaps preferable to the 
method of force and violence, but if the previous history of 
race-prejudice means anything, it means that force will be 
resorted to if legislation fails. At bottom, the spirit of the 



RACIAL MINORITIES 365 

California Land Laws is more than a little like that of a 
Georgia lynching; in the one case as in the other, the domi- 
nant race attempts to maintain its position, not by a man-to- 
man contest, with fair chances all around, but by depositing 
itself bodily and en masse on top of the subject people and 
crushing them. 

If in the realm of individual conduct this sort of behaviour 
works injury to the oppressor, as well as to the oppressed, it is 
not otherwise where masses of men are concerned. Stephen 
Graham, in his recent book, " The Soul of John Brown," says 
that " in America to-day, and especially in the South, there is 
a hereditary taint left by slavery, and it is to be observed in 
the descendants of the masters as much as in the descendants 
of the slaves. It would be a mistake to think of this American 
problem as exclusively a Negro problem." Indeed, it is true 
that in every case the race-problem is the problem of the 
majority as well as of the minority, for the former can no 
more escape the reaction of prejudice than the latter can escape 
its direct effects. 

To-day the white South is still under the influence of a sys- 
tem of life and thought that is far more enduring than the one 
institution which gave it most tomplete expression. The 
Emancipation abolished slavery, but it did not rid the master 
of the idea that it is his right to live by the labour of the 
slave. The black man is not yet relieved of the duty of sup- 
porting a certain proportion of the white population in leisure; 
nor does it appear that the leisured Southerner of to-day makes 
a better use of his time than his ancestors did before him. 
Indeed, an historian who judged the peoples chiefly by their 
contribution to science and the arts would still be obliged to 
condemn the white South, not for enslaving the Negro, but 
for dissipating in the practices of a barren gentility the leisure 
that Negro labour created, and still creates, so abundantly. 
It is notorious also that in the South the airs of gentility have 
been more widely broadcast among the white population than 
the leisure necessary for their practice, with the result that 
much honest work which could not be imposed upon the 
black man has been passed on to posterity, and still remains 
undone. 



366 CIVILIZATION 

Any one who seeks to discover the cause of the mental 
lethargy that has converted the leisure of the South so largely 
into mere laziness must take some account of a factor that is 
always present where race-prejudice exists. The race which 
pretends to superiority may not always succeed in superimpos- 
ing itself economically upon the inferior group; and yet the 
pride and self-satisfaction of the members of the " superior " 
race will pretty surely make for indolence and the deadening 
of the creative spirit. This will almost inevitably be true where 
the superiority of the one race is acknowledged by the other, 
and where no contest of wits is necessary for the maintenance 
of the status quo. This is the condition that has always ob- 
tained, and still obtains in most of the old slave territory. In 
Dixie it is a career simply to go through life inside of a 
white skin. However ignorant and worthless the white man 
may be, it is still his privilege to proclaim on any street corner 
that he is in all respects a finer creature than any one of sev- 
eral million human beings whom he classes all together as 
" good-for-nothin' niggers." If the mere statement of this 
fact is not enough to bring warm applause from all the blacks 
in the neighbourhood, the white man is often more than will- 
ing to use fire and sword to demonstrate a superiority which 
he seldom stoops to prove in any other fashion. Naturally this 
feeling of God-given primacy tends to make its possessors in- 
dolent, immune to new ideas of every sort, and quite willing 
to apply '' the short way with the nigger " to any one who 
threatens the established order of the universe. 

It would be foolish indeed to suppose that the general in- 
tolerance, bigotry, and backwardness which grow out of race- 
prejudice have affected the South alone. The North and the 
West have their prejudices too, their consciousness of a full- 
blooded American superiority that does not have to be proved, 
their lazy-mindedness, their righteous anger, their own short 
way with what is new and strange. No sane man will attribute 
the origin of all these evils to race-prejudice alone, but no 
honest man will deny that the practice of discrimination against 
the racial minorities has helped to infect the whole life and 
thought of the country with a cocky and stupefying provin- 
cialism. 



RACIAL MINORITIES 367 

Perhaps the most interesting phase of the whole racial situa- 
tion in America is the attitude which the minorities themselves 
have maintained in the presence of a dominant prejudice which 
has constantly emphasized and magnified the differences be- 
tween the minorities and majority, and has even maintained 
the spirit of condescension, and the principle of segregation 
in such assimilative activities as education and Christian mis- 
sion work. One would naturally expect that such an attitude 
on the part of the majority would stimulate a counter race- 
prejudice in each of the minorities, which would render them 
also intent upon the maintenance of differentiation. 

Although such a counter prejudice has existed from the be- 
ginning among the Indians, the Jews, and the Asiatics, it is 
only now beginning to take form among the Negroes. The 
conditions of the contact between the black minority and the 
white majority have thus been substantially different from 
those which existed in the other cases, and the results of this 
contact seem to justify the statement that, so long as it remains 
one-sided, the strongest race-prejudice cannot prevent the cul- 
tural and even the biological assimilation of one race to an- 
other. In other words, prejudice defeats itself, in a measure, 
just so long as one of the parties accepts an inferior position; 
in fact, it becomes fully effective only when the despised group 
denies its own inferiority, and throws the reproach back upon 
those with whom it originated. Thus the new racial self- 
consciousness of a small section of the Negro population gives 
the prejudiced whites a full measure of the differentiation they 
desire, coupled with an absolute denial of the inferiority which 
is supposed to justify segregation. 

It has already been pointed out that the enslavement of 
the Negroes deprived them of practically everything to which 
racial pride might attach itself, and left them with no founda- 
tion of their own on which to build. Thus they could make 
no advances of any sort except in so far as they were permitted 
to assimilate the culture of the white man. In the natural 
course of events, the adoption of the English language came 
first, and then shortly the Negro was granted such a share 
in the white man's heaven as he has never yet received of the 
white man's earth. As the only available means of self- 



368 CIVILIZATION 

expression, religion took a tremendous hold upon the slaves, 
and from that day to this, the black South has wailed its heart 
out in appeals to the white man's God for deliverance from the 
white man's burden. The Negro " spirituals " are not the 
songs of African tribesmen, the chants of free warriors. In- 
deed, the white man may claim full credit for the sadness that 
darkens the Negro's music, and put such words as these into 
the mouth of the Lord: 

Go down, Moses, 

Way down in Egyp' Ian' 
Tell ole Pharaoh 
Le' ma people go! 
Israel was in Egyp' Ian' 

Oppres' so hard dey could not stan', 
Le' ma people go! 

When casual observers say that the black man is naturally 
more religious than the white, they lose sight of the fact that 
the number of church-members per thousand individuals in the 
Negro population is about the same as the average for the 
United States as a whole; and they forget also the more im- 
portant fact that the Negro has never had all he wanted of 
anything except religion — and in segregated churches at that. 
It is more true of the black men than of Engel's proletarians, 
that they have been put off for a very long time with checks 
on the bank of Heaven. 

Emancipation and the Fourteenth Amendment seemed to 
open the path to an earthly paradise; but this vision was soon 
eclipsed by a second Civil War that resulted in a substantial 
victory for the white South. Economic repression could not 
be made entirely effective, however, and in the fifty-three years 
from 1866 to 1919 the number of American Negro home- 
owners increased from 12,000 to 600,000 and the number of 
Negroes operating farms from 20,000 to 1,000,000. In 1910 
the Negro population still remained 72.6 per cent, rural, but 
the cityward movement of the blacks during the years 1890 
to 1910 was more rapid than that of the whites. Education has 
directly facilitated economic progress, and has resulted in an 
increase of literacy among the Negroes from ten per cent, in 
1866 to eighty per cent, in 19 19. During the period 1900 to 



RACIAL MINORITIES 369 

1 910, the rate of increase of literacy among the blacks was 
much more rapid than that among the whites. Thus from the 
day he was cut off from his own inheritance, the American 
Negro has reached out eagerly for an alien substitute, until 
to-day, in practically everything that has to do with culture, 
he is not black but white^ — and artificially retarded. 

Since America has deprived the Negro of the opportunity to 
grow up as an African, and at the same time has denied him 
the right to grow up as a white man, it is not surprising that 
a few daring spirits among the Negroes have been driven at 
last to the conclusion that there is no hope for their race 
except in an exodus from the white man's culture and the 
white man's continent. The war did a great deal to prepare 
the way for this new movement; the Negroes of America heard 
much talk of democracy not meant for their ears; their list 
of wrongs was lengthened, but at the same time their economic 
power increased; and many of them learned for the first time 
what it meant to fight back. Some of them armed themselves, 
and began to talk of taking two lives for one when the lynching- 
mob came. Then trouble broke in Chicago and Washington — 
and the casualties were not all of one sort. Out of this welter 
of unrest and rebellion new voices arose, some of them call- 
ing upon the Negro workers to join forces with their white 
brothers; some fierce and vengeful, as bitterly denunciatory 
of socialism and syndicalism as of everything else that had 
felt the touch of the white man's hand; some intoxicated, 
ecstatic with a new religion^ preaching the glory of the black 
race and the hope of the black exodus. 

With much travail, there finally came forth, as an embodi- 
ment of the extreme of race-consciousness, an organization 
called the Universal Negro Improvement Association and Afri- 
can Communities League. This clan lays claim to a million 
members in the United States, the West Indies, South America 
and South Africa, and announces as its final object the estab- 
lishment of a black empire in Africa. Connected with the 
U.N.I.A. are the Black Star Line, capitalized at $10,000,000, 
and the Negro Factories Corporation, capitalized at $2,000,000. 
Just what these astonishing figures mean in actual cash it is 
impossible to say, but this much is certain : the Black Star Line 



370 CIVILIZATION 

already owns three of the many vessels which — say the 
prophets of the movement — will some day ply among the Negro 
lands of the world. 

To cap the climax, the U.N.I.A. held in New York City 
during the month of August, 1920, " the first International 
Negro Convention," which drew up a Negro Declaration of 
Independence, adopted a national flag and a national anthem, 
and elected " a Provisional President of Africa, a leader for 
the American Negroes, and two leaders for the Negroes of 
the West Indies, Central and South America." 

The best testimony of the nature of this new movement is 
to be found in an astonishing pamphlet called the " Universal 
Negro Catechism," and issued " by authority of the High 
Executive Council of the Universal Negro Improvement Asso- 
ciation." In this catechism one discovers such items as the 
following, under the head of " Religious Knowledge ": 

Q. Did God make any group or race of men superior to another? 
A. No ; He created all races equal, and of one blood, to dwell on all 
the face of the earth. 

Q. What is the colour of God? 

A. A spirit has neither colour, nor other natural parts, nor qualities. 

Q. If . . . you had to think or speak of the colour of God, how 
would you describe it? 

A. As black; since we are created in His image and likeness. 

Q. What did Jesus Christ teach as the essential principle of true 
religion? 

A. The universal brotherhood of man growing out of the universal 
Fatherhood of God. 

Q. Who is responsible for the colour of the Ethiopians? 
A. The Creator; and what He has done cannot be changed. Read 
Jeremiah 13 : 23. 

Q. What prediction made in the 68th Psalm and the 31st Verse is 
now being fulfilled? 

A. " Princes shall come out of Egypt, Ethiopia shall soon stretch 
out her hands unto God." 

Q. What does this verse prove? 

A. That Negroes will set up their own government in Africa with 
rulers of their own race. 

Q. Will Negroes ever be given equal opportunity and treatment in 
countries ruled by white men? 

A. No; they will enjoy the full rights of manhood and liberty only 
when they establish their own nation and government in Africa. 



RACIAL MINORITIES 371 

Perhaps enough has already been said to make it clear that 
there exists in America no distinctive black culture which could 
spontaneously give rise to such a movement as this. Cul- 
turally the black man is American; biologically he is African. 
It is solely and entirely the prejudice of the American ma- 
jority that has forced this group of Negroes to attempt to recon- 
struct a cultural and sentimental connection that was destroyed 
long ago. The task which faces the leaders of the new move- 
ment is one of almost insurmountable difficulty, for in spite 
of every sort of persecution, the general life and thought of 
America are still far more easily accessible to the Negro than 
is anything distinctively his own. 

The cultural shipwreck of the Negro on the American shore 
has thus placed him more completely at the mercy of the 
majority than the other minorities have ever been. In the 
case of the Indians, the Jews, and the Orientals, the race-name 
has not stood simply for an incomplete Americanism, but for 
a positive cultural quality which has persisted in the face of 
all misfortune. These races were provisioned, so to speak, for 
a long siege, while the Negro had no choice but to eat out of 
the white man's hand, or starve. 

The reservation-system has reduced many of the Indian 
tribes to a state of economic dependence, but it has also helped 
to preserve their cultural autonomy. In most cases the iso- 
lated communities on the reservations are distinctly Indian 
communities. The non-material inheritance of the past has 
come down to the present generation in a fairly complete form, 
with the result that the Indian of to-day may usually take his 
choice between Indian culture and white. Under these condi- 
tions the labours of missionaries and educators have not been 
phenomenally successful, as is witnessed by the fact that the 
number of Protestant Christians per thousand Indians is still 
only about one-seventh as large as that for the Negroes, while 
the percentage of illiterates is much larger among the Indians. 
However, school attendance is increasing at a more rapid rate 
than among the whites, and the prospect is that the Govern- 
ment schools will eventually deprive the country of all that is 
attractive in Indian life. 

Toward the close of the 19th century, the Indian's resent- 



372 CIVILIZATION 

ment of the white man's overbearing actions found expression 
in a religious movement which originated in Nevada and spread 
eastward till it numbered among its adherents nearly all the 
natives between the Rocky Mountains and the Missouri River. 
This messianic faith bore the name of a ceremonial connected 
with it, the Ghost Dance, and was based upon a divine revela- 
tion which promised the complete restoration of the Indian's 
inheritance. Such doctrines have, of course, been preached in 
many forms and in many lands, but it is no great compliment 
to the amiability of American civilization that the gospel of 
deliverance has found so many followers among the Negroes, 
the Indians, and the Jews who dwell within the borders of the 
country. 

It does not seem likely that the Zionist version of this gospel 
will produce any general exodus of the last-named minority 
from this country, for in spite of prejudice, the Jews have been 
able to make a large place for themselves in the United States. 
Since the movements of the Jews have not been systematically 
restricted, as those of the Negroes and the Indians have 
been, the great concentration of the Jewish population in the 
cities of the East would seem to be due in large measure to the 
choice of the Jews themselves. At the present time they domi- 
nate the clothing industry, the management of the theatre, and 
the production of motion-pictures. Approximately one-tenth 
of the trade-unionists in the United States are Jews, and the 
adherence of a considerable number of Jews to the doctrines 
of socialism and syndicalism has unquestionably been one of 
the causes of prejudice against the race. 

In matters that pertain more directly to the intellectual life, 
the Jews have exhibited every degree of eagerness for, and 
opposition to, assimilation. There are among them many 
schools for the teaching of the Hebrew language, and some 
other schools — private and expensive ones — in which only non- 
Jewish, " all-American " teachers are employed. Of the 
seventy-eight Jewish periodicals published in the United States, 
forty-eight are printed in English. In every Jewish centre, 
Yiddish theatres have been established for the amusement of 
the people; but Jewish managers, producers, actors, and play- 
wrights have also had a large part in the general dramatic 



RACIAL MINORITIES 373 

activities of the country. Finally, in the matter of religion, 
the response of the Jews to Christian missionary work has 
been very slight indeed, while, on the other hand, the number 
of synagogue-members per thousand Jews is only about one- 
fourth the general average of religious affiliation for the United 
States as a whole. When one considers the fact that in some 
fields the Jews have thus made advances in spite of opposition, 
while in others they have refused opportunities offered to them, 
it seems at least probable that the incompleteness of their 
cultural assimilation is due as much to their own racial pride 
as to the prejudice of the majority. 

Similarly in the case of the Orientals, the pride and self- 
sufficiency of the minority has helped to preserve for it a meas- 
ure of cultural autonomy. In the absence of such a disposition 
on the part of the Chinese, it would be difficult to account for 
the fact that their native costume has not disappeared during 
the thirty-nine years since the stoppage of immigration. San 
Francisco's Chinatown still remains very markedly Chinese 
in dress largely because the Chinese themselves have chosen 
to keep it so. The Japanese have taken much more kindly to 
the conventional American costume, but one is hardly justified 
in inferring from this that they are more desirous for general 
assimilation. Indeed, one would expect the opposite to be 
the case, for most of the Japanese in America had felt the 
impress of the nationalistic revival in Japan before their de- 
parture from that country. In a measure this accounts for the 
fact that Japanese settlers have established a number of Bud- 
dhist temples and Japanese-language schools in the United 
States. However, figures furnished by the " Joint Committee 
on Foreign Language Publications," which represents a num- 
ber of Evangehcal denominations, seem to indicate that the 
Japanese in the United States are much more easily Christian- 
ized than the Chinese, and are even less attached to Buddhism 
than are the Jews to their native faith. In the nature of 
things, the domestic practice of Shinto-worship among the 
Japanese is incapable of statistical treatment. 

Thus the combination of all the internal and external forces 
that affect the racial minorities in America has produced a 
partial, but by no means a complete, remodelling of minority- 



374 CIVILIZATION 

life in accordance with standards set by the majority. Preju- 
dice and counter-prejudice have not prevented this change, 
and there is no accounting for the condition of the American | 
minorities to-day without due attention to the positive factor ; 
of cultural assimilation, as well as to the negative factor of 
prejudice. 

Since it has already been implied that a greater or less assimi- ' 
lation by the minorities of the culture of the majority is 
inevitable, it is apparent that the relation of this assimilative 
change to the biological fusion of the groups is a matter of 
ultimate and absolute importance. Wherever friction exists 
between racial groups, the mere mention of biological fusion is 
likely to stir up so much fire and smoke that all facts are 
completely lost to sight; and yet it is quite obvious that the 
forces of attraction and repulsion which play upon the several 
races in America have produced biological as well as cultural 
results. 

The mulatto population of the United States is the physical 
embodiment of a one-sided race-prejudice. By law, by cus- 
tom, even by the visitation of sudden and violent death, the 
master-class of the South expresses a disapproval of relations 
between white women and coloured men, which does not apply 
in any forcible way to similar relations between white men 
and coloured women. The white male is in fact the go- 
between for the races. The Negroes have not the power, 
and sometimes not even the will, to protect themselves against 
his advances, and the result is that illegitimate mulatto chil- 
dren in great numbers are born of Negro mothers and left to 
share the lot of the coloured race. 

If the infusion of white blood were stopped entirely, the 
proportion of mulattoes in the Negro race would nevertheless 
go on increasing, since the children of a mulatto are usually 
mulattoes, whether the other parent be mulatto or black. 
There is, however, no reason for supposing that under such 
conditions the proportion of mulattoes to blacks would increase 
more rapidly in one geographic area than in another. The 
fact is that during the period 1890 to 1910 the number of 
mulattoes per 1,000 blacks decreased in the North from 390 



RACIAL MINORITIES 375 

to 363, and increased in the South from 159 to 252; the in- 
ference as to white parenthood is obvious. During the same 
period the black population of the entire United States in- 
creased 22.7 per cent., while the mulatto population increased 
8 1. 1 per cent. The mulatto group is thus growing far more 
rapidly than either the black or the white, and the male white 
population of the South is largely responsible for the present 
expansion of this class, as well as for its historical origin. 

Thus the South couples a maximum of repression with a 
maximum of racial intermixture; indeed, the one is naturally 
and intimately associated with the other. The white popula- 
tion as a whole employs all manner of devices to keep the 
Negro in the social and economic status most favourable to 
sexual promiscuity, and aggressive white males take full advan- 
tage of the situation thus created. 

While it is not generally admitted in the South that the pro- 
gressive whitening of the black race is a natural result of the 
maintenance of a system of slavery and subjection, the converse 
of this proposition is stated and defended with all possible 
ardour. That is to say, it is argued that any general improve- 
ment in the condition of the Negro will increase the likelihood 
of racial intermixture on a higher level, through inter-marriage. 
The Southerners who put forth this argument know very well 
that inter-marriage is not likely to take place in the presence 
of strong race-prejudice, and they know, too, that the Negro 
who most arouses their animosity is the " improved " Negro 
who will not keep his place. They are unwilling to admit 
that this increase in prejudice is due largely, if not wholly, 
to the greater competitive strength of the improved Negro; 
and likewise they prefer to disregard the fact that such a Negro 
resents white prejudice keenly, and tends to exhibit on his own 
part a counter prejudice which in itself acts as an additional 
obstacle to inter-marriage. 

In the absence of such factors as Negro self-consciousness 
and inter-racial competition, it would be difficult to account for 
the extreme rarity of marriages between blacks and whites in 
the Northern States. No comprehensive study of this subject 
has been made, but an investigation conducted by Julius 
Drachsler has shown that of all the marriages contracted by 



376 CIVILIZATION 

Negroes in New York City during the years 1908 to 191 2, only 
C.93 per cent, were mixed. The same investigation revealed 
the fact that Negro men contracted mixed marriages about four 
times as frequently as Negro women. 

Marriages between whites and Indians have not been so 
vigorously condemned by the American majority as those 
between whites and Negroes, and the presumption is that the 
former have been much more frequent. However, it appears 
that no systematic investigation of Indian mixed marriages 
has been made, and certainly no census previous to that of 
1 9 10 gives any data of value on the subject of mixed blood 
among the Indians. The enumeration of 19 10 showed that 
56.5 per cent of the Indians were full-blooded, 35.2 per cent, 
were of mixed blood, and 8.4 per cent, were unclassified. Al- 
though it is impossible to fix the responsibility as definitely 
here as in the case of the Negro, it is obvious that an infusion 
of white blood half again as great as that among the Negroes 
cannot be accounted for in any large part by racial inter- 
marriages. Without question, it is chiefly due to the same 
sort of promiscuity that has been so common in the South, and 
the present and potential checks upon the process of infusion 
are similar to those already discussed. 

In the case of the Jews and the Asiatics, it seems that the 
only figures available are those gathered by Drachsler. He 
found that only 1.17 per cent, of the marriages contracted 
by Jews in New York City during the years 1908 to 191 2 were 
classifiable as " mixed," while the corresponding percentages 
for the Chinese and the Japanese were 55.56 and 72.41 
respectively. The largeness of the figures in the case of Ori- 
entals is accounted for in part by the fact that there are com- 
paratively few women of Mongolian race in New York City. 
Besides this, it must be remembered that, whatever the degree 
of their cultural assimilation, the Chinese and Japanese resi- 
dents of the metropolis are not sufficiently numerous to form 
important competitive groups, while the Jews constitute one- 
quarter of the entire population of the city. Does any one 
doubt that the situation in regard to mixed marriages would be 
partially reversed in San Francisco? 

When due allowance is made for special conditions, 



RACIAL MINORITIES 377 

Drachsler's figures do not seem to run contrary to the general 
proposition that an improvement in the economic and social 
condition of one of the minorities, and a partial or complete 
adoption by the minority of the culture of the majority, does 
not necessarily prepare the way for racial fusion, but seems to 
produce exactly the opposite effect by increasing the competi- 
tive power of the minority, the majority's fear of its rivals, and 
the prejudice of each against the other. 

In spite of all that prejudice can do to prevent it, the eco- 
nomic, social, and intellectual condition of the minorities is 
becoming increasingly like that of the majority; and yet it is 
not to be expected that as long as the minorities remain physi- 
cally recognizable this change will result in the elimination of 
prejudice, nor is it likely that the cultural assimilation which 
checks the process of racial intermixture through promiscuous 
intercourse will result automatically in intermixture on a higher 
level, and the consequent disappearance of the recognizability 
of the minorities. Prejudice does not altogether prevent cul- 
tural assimilation; cultural assimilation increases competitive 
strength without eliminating recognizability; competitive 
strength plus recognizability produces more prejudice; and so 
on . . . and so on, . . . Thus it seems probable that race- 
prejudice will persist in America as long as the general eco- 
nomic, social, political, and intellectual system which has nur- 
tured it endures. No direct attack upon the race-problem, as 
such, can alter this system in any essential way. 

Is this conception sound, or not? It stands very high upon 
?. slim scaffolding of facts, put together in pure contrariness 
after it had been stated that no adequate foundation for such 
a structure could be found anywhere. But, after all, it is no 
great matter what happens to the notion that race-prejudice 
can be remedied only incidentally. If the conditions which 
surround race-prejudice are only studied comparatively, this 
notion and others like it will get all the attention they deserve. 

RACE PROBLEMS 

(The answers are merely by way of suggestion, but the ques- 
tions may prove to be worthy of serious attention.) 



378 CIVILIZATION 

Q. Has the inherent inferiority of any human race been established 
by historical, biological or psychological evidence? 
A. No. 

Q. Does the theory of the inequality of human races offer a satis- 
factory explanation of the existence of race-prejudice? 
A. No. 

Q. Do physical characteristics make the members of the several 
races recognizable? 
A. Yes. 

Q. Is race-prejudice inherent and inevitable, in the sense that it 
always exists vi^here two recognizably different races are in contact? 
A. No. 

Q. How does it happen that in the presence of racial factors which 
remain constant, race-prejudice exists in some localities, and is absent 
in others? 

A. No satisfactory explanation of these local variations in inter- 
racial feeling has yet been given ; however, the existence of the variations 
themselves would seem to indicate that the primary causes of race- 
prejudice are not racial but regional. 

Q. What study will lead most directly to an understanding of race- 
prejudice — that of universal racial differences, or that of regional environ- 
mental differences which are associated with the existence and non- 
existence of racial prejudice? 

A. The latter. 

Q. Does the systematic study of regional environmental differences in 
the United States, in their relation to race-prejudice, yield any results 
of importance? 

A. No such systematic study has ever been made ; a casual glance 
seems to reveal an interesting coincidence between race-prejudice and the 
fear of competition. 

Q. Is competition more likely to produce race-prejudice in the 
United States than elsewhere? 

A. Because of the general preoccupation of the American people with 
material affairs, economic competition is likely to produce unusually 
sharp antagonisms. 

Q. Does the coincidence between race-prejudice and the fear of com- 
petition offer a complete explanation of the existence and strength of 
race-prejudice in the United States? 

A. No ; no such claim has been advanced. 

Q. Is the assimilation by the minorities of the culture of the majority 
talking place continuously, in spite of the prejudice of the majority and 
the counter-prejudice of three of the minorities? 

A. Yes. 

Q. Does this cultural assimilation make for better inter-racial feeling? 

A. Probably not, because as long as physical race-differences remain, 
cultural assimilation increases the strength of the minority as a recogniz- 
able competitive group, and hence it also increases the keenness of the 
rivalry between the minorities and the majority. 



RACIAL MINORITIES 379 

Q. How can the recognizability of the minorities be eliminated? 
A. By blood-fusion with the majority. 

Q. How can blood-fusion come about if cultural assimilation in- 
creases rivalry and prejudice? 

A 

Q. Is it then true that, as things stand, the future of inter-racial 
relations in the United States depends upon the ratio beween cultural 
assimilation, which seems inevitable, and biological assimilation, which 
seems unlikely? 

A. It so appears. 

Q. Does the race-problem in the United States then seem practically 
insoluble as a separate problem? 
A. It does. 

Q. Has the race-problem ever been solved anywhere by direct attack 
upon it as a race problem? 
A. Probably not. 

Q. Does not this conclusion involve a return to the assumption that 
race-prejudice is inevitable wherever race-differences exist; and has this 
not been emphatically denied? 

A. On the contrary, the implication is that race-prejudice is inevitable 
where race-prejudice exists. The conclusion in regard to the United 
States is based on the single assumption that the non-racial conditions 
under which race prejudice has arisen will remain practically unchanged. 

Q. Is it then conceivable that a complete alteration of non-racial 
conditions — as, for instance, an economic revolution which would change 
the whole meaning of the word " competition " — might entirely revise the 
terms of the problem? 

A. It is barely conceivable — but this paper is not an accepted channel 
for divine revelation. 

Ceroid Tanquary Robinson 



UK: 



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ern American civilization than in doubting the existence of a 
power so great that overnight it can raise up in our midst gods, 
kings, and other potentates, creating a world which for splen- 
dour and opulence far surpasses our own poor mortal sphere — 
a world in which every prospect pleases and only the reluctant 
spender is vile. 

True, we can only catch a fleeting glimpse of its many mar- 
vels. True, we have scarcely time to admire a millionth part 
of the joys and magnificence of one before a new and greatly 
improved universe floats across the horizon, and, from every 
corner news-stand, smilingly bids us enter its portals. True, 
I repeat, our inability to grasp or appreciate the full wonder 
of these constantly arriving creations, yet even the narrow 
limitations of our savage and untutored minds can hardly 
prevent us from acclaiming a miracle we fail to understand. 

If it were only given me to live the life led by any one of 
the fortunate creatures that dwell in these advertising worlds, 
I should gladly renounce my home, my wife, and my evil ways 
and become the super-snob of a mock creation. All day long 
should I stand smartly clad in a perfectly fitting union-suit just 
for the sport of keeping my obsequious butler waiting painfully 
for me with my lounging-gown over his exhausted arm. On 
other days I should be found sitting in mute adoration before 
a bulging bowl of breakfast food, and, if any one should chance 
to be listening at the keyhole, they might even catch me in the 
act of repeating reverently and with an avid smile on my lips, 
" I can never stir from the table until I have completely 
crammed myself with Red-Blooded American Shucks," add- 
ing in a mysterious whisper, " To be had at all good grocers." 

381 



382 CIVILIZATION 

There would be other days of course, days when I should 
ride in a motor of unrivalled power with companions of un- 
rivalled beauty, across canyons of unrivalled depth and moun- 
tains of unrivalled height. Then would follow still other days, 
the most perfect days of all, days when the snow-sheathed earth 
cracks in the clutches of an appalling winter and only the lower 
classes stir abroad. This would be the time that I should 
select for removing the lounging gown from my butler's arm 
and bask in the glowing warmth of my perfect heater, with my 
chair placed in such a position as to enable me to observe the 
miserable plight of my neighbours across the way as they strive 
pitifully to keep life in their bodies over the dying embers of 
an anaemic fire. The sight of the sobbing baby and haggard 
mother would only serve to intensify my satisfaction in having 
been so fortunate and far-sighted as to have possessed myself of 
a Kill Kold Liquid Heat Projector — That Keeps the Family 
Snug. 

What days I should spend! Take the literary days, for 
instance. Could anything be more edifying than to dip dis- 
criminatingly into a six-inch bookshelf with the absolute assur- 
ance that a few minutes spent thus each day in dipping would, 
in due course of time, give me complete mastery of all the best 
literature of the world — and incidentally gain for me a sub- 
stantial raise at the office? Nor could any of the literature 
of the past ages equal my hidden library of books containing 
Vital Secrets. In this room there would linger a never-failing 
thrill. Here I should retreat to learn the secret of success, 
the secret of salesmanship, the secret of vigour, the secret of 
bull-dozing one's boss, the secret of spell-binding, the secret of 
personality and social charm, all bearing a material value meas- 
ured in dollars and cents. In time I should so seethe with 
secrets that, unable to bear them any longer, I should break 
down before my friends and give the whole game away. 

But why should I lacerate my heart in the contemplation of 
happiness I shall never experience? Why should I dwell upon 
the pipe-filling days, or the days when I should send for sam- 
ples? Why torture my mind with those exquisitely tailored 
days when, with a tennis racket in one hand and a varsity crew 
captain on my shoulder, I should parade across the good old 



ADVERTISING 383 

campus in a suit bereft of wrinkles and a hat that destroyed 
the last shreds of restraint in all beholding women? No, I 
can go no further. 

For when I consider the remarkable characters that so 
charmingly infest my paradise never found, I cannot help ask- 
ing myself, " How do they get that way? " How do the men's 
legs grow so slim and long and their chins so smooth and 
square? Why have the women always such perfect limbs and 
such innocent but alluring smiles? Why are families always 
happy and children always good? What miracle has banished 
the petty irritations and deficiencies of life and smoothed out 
the problems of living? How and why — is there an answer? 
Can it all be laid at the door of advertising, or do we who 
read, the great, sweltering mass of us, insist upon such things 
and demand a world of artificial glamour and perfectly impos- 
sible people? The crime is committed by collusion, I am 
forced to conclude. Advertising, for the most part, makes 
its appeal to all that is superficial and snobbish in us, and we 
as a solid phalanx are only too glad to be appealed to in such 
a manner. 

In only the most unscholarly way can I lay my reflections 
before you, and the first one is this: advertising is America's 
cruelest and most ruthless sport, religion, or profession, or 
whatever you choose to call it. With an accurate stroke, but 
with a perverted intent, it coddles and toys with all that is base 
and gross in our physical and spiritual compositions. The 
comforts and happiness it holds out to the reader are for ever 
contrasted with the misery and misfortune of another. Thus, 
if I ride in a certain make of motor, I have the satisfaction 
of knowing that every one who rides in a motor of another 
make is of a lower caste than myself and will certainly eat dust 
for the rest of his life. There is a real joy in this knowledge. 
Again, if I wear a certain advertised brand of underwear, I 
have the pleasure of knowing that my fellow-men not so fortu- 
nately clad are undoubtedly foolish swine who will eventually 
die of sunstroke, after a life devoted entirely to sweating. 
Here, too, is a joy of rare order. If I brush my teeth with 
an advertised tooth paste, my satisfaction is enhanced by the 
knowledge that all other persons who fail to use this particular 



384 CIVILIZATION 

paste will in a very short time lose all of their teeth. In this 
there is a savage, but authentic delight. Even if I select a 
certain classic from my cherished six-inch bookshelf, I shall 
have a buoyant feeling in knowing that all men, who, after the 
fatigue of the day, take comfort in the latest murder or ball- 
game, are of inferior intellect and will never succeed in the 
world of business. 

This is one of the most successful weapons used in adver- 
tising, and there is no denying that a great majority of people 
take pleasure in being struck by it. It is a pleasure drawn 
from the same source that feeds so many people's sense of sat- 
isfaction when they attend a funeral, or call on a sick friend, 
or a friend in misfortune and disgrace. It was the same source 
of inner satisfaction which made it possible for many loyal 
citizens to bear not only with fortitude, but with bliss, the sor- 
rows of the late war. It is the instinct of self-preservation, 
toned down to a spirit of complacent self-congratulation, and 
it responds most readily to the appeal of selfishness and snob- 
bery. Advertising did not create this instinct, nor did it dis- 
cover it, but advertising uses it for its own ends. Who is to 
blame, the reader or the advertiser, hardly enters in at this 
point. The solid fact to take into consideration is that day 
in and day out the susceptible public is being worked upon in 
an unhealthy and neurotic manner which cannot fail to effect 
harmful results. 

At this tragic moment I purpose briefly to digress to the 
people who create advertisements, before returning to a con- 
sideration of the effects of their creations. 

To begin with, let it never be forgotten that advertising is 
a red-blooded, two-fisted occupation, engaged in for the most 
part by upstanding Americans of the kiss-the-flag or knock- 
'em-down-and-drag-'em-out variety. Yet years of contact with 
the profession compel me for the sake of truth to temper this 
remark by adding that it also contains, or rather confines, 
within its mystic circle a group of reluctant and recalcitrant 
" creatures that once were men," who, moving through a phan- 
tasmagoria of perverted idealism, flabby optimism, and unex- 
amined motives, either deaden their conscience in the twilight 
of the " Ad. Men's Club," or else become so blindly embittered 



ADVERTISING 385 

or debauched that their usefulness is lost to all constructive 
movements. 

Generally speaking, however, advertising is the graveyard 
of literary aspiration in which the spirits of the defeated as- 
pirants, wielding a momentary power over a public that re- 
jected their efforts, blackjack it into buying the most amazing 
assortment of purely useless and cheaply manufactured com- 
modities that has ever marked the decline of culture and com- 
mon sense. These men are either caught early after their 
flight from college, or else recruited from the newspaper world. 
Some — the most serious and determined — are products of cor- 
respondence schools. Others are merely robust spirits whose 
daily contact with their fellow-men does not give them suffi- 
cient opportunity to disgorge themselves of the abundance of 
misinformation that their imaginations manufacture in whole- 
sale quantities. This advertising brotherhood is composed of 
a heterogeneous mass of humanity that is rapidly converted 
into a narrow-minded wedge of fanatics. And this wedge is 
continually boring into the pocketbook of the public and ex- 
tracting therefrom a goodly quantity of gold and silver. Have 
you ever conversed with one of the more successful and im- 
portant members of this vast body? If so have you been able 
to quit the conversation with an intelligent impression of its 
subject-matter? For example: do you happen to know what 
a visualizer is? If not, you would be completely at the mercy 
of a true advertising exponent. Returning to my Edisonian 
method of attack, do you happen to know by any chance what 
a rough-out man is, or what is the meaning of dealer mortality, 
quality appeal, class circulation, or institutional copy? Prob- 
ably not, for there is at bottom very little meaning to them; 
nevertheless, they are terms that are sacred to a great num- 
ber of advertising men, and which, if unknown, would render 
all intelligent communication with them quite impossible. 

If you should ever attend a session of these gentlemen in full 
cry — and may God spare you this — you would return from it 
with the impression that all was not well with the world. You 
would have heard speeches on the idealism of meat-packing, 
and other kindred subjects. The idealism would be transmit- 
ted to you through the medium of a hireling of some large 



386 CIVILIZATION 

packing organization, a live-wire, God-bless-you, hail-fellow' 
type. Assuming that you had. been there, you would have wit- 
nessed this large fellow with a virile exhalation of cigar-smoke, 
heave himself from his chair ; you would have observed a good- 
natured smile play across his lips, and then you would have 
suddenly been taken aback by the tenderly earnest and master- 
fully restrained expression that transformed our buffoon into 
a suffering martyr, as, flinging out his arms, he tragically ex- 
claimed, " Gentlemen, you little know the soul of the man who 
has given the Dreadnought Ham to the world! " From this 
moment on your sense of guilt would have increased by leaps 
and bounds until at last you would have broken down com- 
pletely and agreed with everything the prophet said, as long 
as he refrained from depriving you of an opportunity to make 
it up to the god-like man who gave Dreadnought Hams to the 
world. 

The orator would go on to tell you about the happiness 
and sunlight that flood the slaughter-house in which Dread- 
nought Hams are made. You would hear about the lovely, 
whimsical old character, who, one day, when in the act of 
polishing off a pig, stood in a position of suspended anima- 
tion with knife poised above the twitching ear of the un- 
fortunate swine, and seizing the hand of the owner as he 
passed benevolently by, kissed it fervently and left on it a 
tear of gratitude. Perhaps you would not hear that in the 
ardour of loyal zeal this lovable old person practically cut the 
pig to ribbons, thus saving it from a nervous collapse, nor 
would you be permitted to hear a repetition of the imprecations 
the old man muttered after the departing back of the owner, 
for these things should not be heard, — in fact, they do not exist 
in the world of advertising. Nothing would be said about the 
red death of the pig, the control of the stock-raiser, the under- 
paying of the workers, the daughter who visits home when 
papa is out and the neighbours are not looking, the long years 
of service and the short shrift of age, the rottenness and hy- 
pocrisy of the whole business — no, nothing should be said 
about such things. But to make up for the omission, you 
would be told in honied words of the workers who lovingly 
kiss each ham as it is reverently carried from the plant to re- 



ADVERTISING 387 

ceive the partiarchal blessing of the owner before it is offered 
up as a sacrifice to a grateful but greedy public. The whole 
affair would suggest to you a sort of Passion Play in which 
there was neither Judas nor Pilot, but just a great, big happy 
family of ham producers. 

This speech, as I have said, would soon appear in the prin- 
cipal papers of the country. It would be published in install- 
ments, each one bearing its message of peace on earth, good- 
will to men, and the public — always preferring Pollyanna to 
Blue Beard — would be given an altogether false impression 
of Dreadnought Hams, and the conditions under which they 
were produced. But this particular speech would be only a 
small part of the idealism you would be permitted to absorb. 
There would also be a patriotic speech about Old Glory, which 
would somehow become entangled with the necessity for cre- 
ating a wider demand for a certain brand of socks. There 
would perhaps be a speech on the sacredness of the home, 
linked cunningly with the ability of a certain type of talking- 
machine to keep the family in at nights and thus make the 
home even more sacred. There would be speeches without 
end, and idealism without stint, and at last every one would 
shake hands with every one else and the glorious occasion 
would come to an end only to be repeated with renewed vigour 
and replenished optimism on the following Friday. 

But the actual work of creating advertisements is seldom 
done in this rarefied and rose-tinted atmosphere; it is done in 
the more prosaic atmosphere of the advertising agency. (And 
let it be said at once that although, even in the case of agencies 
engaging in "Honest Advertising" campaigns, many such 
firms indulge in the unscrupulous competitive practice of split- 
ting their regular commission with their clients in order to 
keep and secure accounts, there are still honest advertising 
agencies.) 

Now there are two important classes of workers in most 
agencies — the copy-writer and the solicitor — the man who 
writes the advertisements and the man who gets the business. 
This latter class contains the wolves of advertising, the restless 
stalkers through the forests of industry and the fields of trade. 
They are leather-lunged and full-throated; death alone can 



388 CIVILIZATION 

save their victims from hearing their stories out. Copy- 
writers, on the other hand, are really not bad at heart; some- 
times they even possess a small saving spark of humour, and 
frequently they attempt to read something other than Printer's 
Ink. But the fuli-edged sohcitor is beyond all hope. Coming 
in close touch with the client who usually is an industrialist, 
capitalist, stand-patter, and high-tariff enthusiast, the solicitor 
gradually becomes a small edition of the man he serves, and 
reflects his ideas in an even more brutal and unenlightened 
manner. In their minds there is no room for change, unless it 
be change to a new kind of automobile they are advertising, for 
new furniture, unless it be the collapsible table of their latest 
client, for spring cleaning, unless thereby one is introduced to 
the virtues of Germ-Destroying Soap. Things must remain as 
they are and the leaders of commerce and industry must be 
protected at all costs. To them there are no under-paid work- 
ers, no social evil, no subsidized press, no restraint of free 
speech, no insanitary plants, no child-labour, no infant mortal- 
ity due to an absence of maternity legislation, no good strikers, 
and no questionable public utility corporations. Everything is 
as it should be, and any one who attempts to effect a change is 
a socialist, and that ends it all. 

Advertising is very largely controlled by men of this 
type. Is it any wonder that it is of a reactionary and arti- 
ficial nature, and that any irresponsible promoter with money 
to spend and an article to sell, will find a sympathetic and wily 
minister to execute his plans for him, regardless of their effect 
on the economic or social life of the nation? 

Turning, for the moment, from the people who create adver- 
tisements to advertising as an institution, what is there to be 
said for or against it? What is there to advance in justifica- 
tion of its existence, or in favour of its suppression? Not 
knowing on which side the devil's advocate pleads his case, I 
shall take the liberty of representing both sides, presenting as 
impartially as possible the cases for the prosecution and de- 
fence and allowing the reader to bring in the verdict in ac- 
cordance with the evidence. 

The first charge — that the low state of the press and the 
magazine world is due solely to advertising — is not, I believe, 



ADVERTISING 389 

wholly fair. There is no use denying that advertising is re- 
sponsible for the limitation of free utterance and the non- 
existence of various independent and amusing publications. 
However, assuming that advertising were utterly banished from 
the face of the earth, would the murky atmosphere be cleared 
thereby? Would the press become free and unafraid, and 
would the ideal magazine at last draw breath in the full light 
of day? I think not. Years before advertising had attained 
the importance it now enjoys, public service corporations and 
other powerful vested interests had found other and equally 
effective methods of shaping the news and controlling edito- 
rial policies. The fact remains however, and it is a suffi- 
ciently black one, that advertising is responsible for much of 
the corruption of our papers and other publications, as well as 
for the absence of the type of periodicals that make for the 
culture of a people and the enjoyment of good literature. 
When a profiteering owner of a large department store can 
succeed in keeping the fact of his conviction from appearing 
in the news, while a number of smaller offenders are held up 
as horrid examples, it is not difficult to decide whether or not 
it pays to advertise. When any number of large but loosely 
conducted corporations upon which the people and the nation 
depend, can prevent from appearing in the press any informa- 
tion concerning their mismanagement, inefficiency, and extrava- 
gance, or any editorial advocating government control, one 
does not have to ponder deeply to determine the efficacy of 
advertising. When articles or stories dealing with the unholy 
conditions existing in certain industries, or touching on the risks 
of motoring, the dangers of eating canned goods, or the impos- 
sibility of receiving a dollar's value for a dollar spent in a 
modern department store, are rejected by many publications, 
regardless of their merit, one does not have to turn to the back 
pages of the magazine in order to discover the names and prod- 
ucts of the advertisers paying for the space. Indeed, one of 
the most regrettable features of advertising is that it makes 
so many things possible for editors who will be good, and so 
many things impossible for editors who are too honest and too 
independent to tolerate dictation. 

Another charge against advertising is that it promotes and 



390 CIVILIZATION 

encourages the production of a vast quantity of costly 
articles many of which duplicate themselves, and that this 
over-production of commodities, many of them of highly 
questionable value, is injurious to the country and eco- 
nomically unsound. This charge seems to be well founded 
in fact, and illustrated only too convincingly in the list 
of our daily purchases. Admitting that a certain amount of 
competition creates a stimulating and healthy reaction, it still 
seems hardly reasonable that a nation, to appear with a clean 
face each morning, should require the services of a dozen 
producers of safety razors, and several hundred producers of 
soap, and that the producers of razors and soap should spend 
millions of dollars each year in advertising in order to remind 
people to wash and shave. Nor does it seem to be a well-bal- 
anced system of production v;hen such commodities as automo- 
biles, sewing machines, face powders, toilet accessories, food 
products, wearing apparel, candy, paint, furniture, rugs, tonics, 
machinery, and so on ad infinitum can exist in such lavish 
abundance. With so many things of the same kind to choose 
from, there is scarcely any reason to wonder that the purchas- 
ing public becom^es addle-brained and fickle. The over-produc- 
tion of both the essentials and non-essentials of life is indubit- 
ably stimulated by advertising, with the result that whenever 
business depression threatens the country, much unnecessary 
unemployment and hardship arises because of an over-bur- 
dened market and an industrial world crowded with moribund 
manufacturing plants. " Give me a strong enough motor and 
I will make that table fly," an aviator once remarked. It could 
be said with equal truth, " Give me money enough to spend in 
advertising and I will make any product sell." Flying tables, 
however, are not nearly so objectionable as a market glutted 
with useless and over-priced wares, and an army of labour de- 
pendent for its existence upon an artificially stimulated de- 
mand. 

The claim that advertising undermines the habits of thrift 
of a nation requires no defence. Products are made to be sold 
and it is the principal function of advertising to sell them re- 
gardless of their merits or the requirements of the people. Men 
and women purchase articles to-day that would have no place 



ADVERTISING 391 

in any socially and economically safe civilization. As long as 
this condition continues, money will be drawn out of the sav- 
ings accounts of the many and deposited in the commercial 
accounts of the few — a situation which hardly makes for happy 
and healthy families. 

It has been asserted by many that advertising is injurious to 
literary style. I am far from convinced that this charge is true. 
In my belief it has been neither an injurious nor helpful in- 
fluence. If anything, it has forced a number of writers to say 
a great deal in a few words, which is not in itself an undesirable 
accomplishment. Nor do I believe that advertising has re- 
cruited to its ranks a number of writers or potential writers 
who might otherwise have given pearls of faith to the world. 
However, if it has attracted any first-calibre writers, they have 
only themselves to blame and there is still an opportunity for 
them to scale the heights of literary eminence. 

The worst has been said of advertising, I feel, when we agree 
that it has contributed to the corruption of the press^ that it 
does help to endanger the economic safety of the nation, and 
that, to a great extent, it appeals to the public in a false and 
unhealthy manner. These charges certainly are sufficiently 
damaging. For the rest, let us admit that advertising is more 
or less like all other businesses, subject to the same criticisms 
and guilty of the same mistakes. Having admitted this, let us 
assume the role of the attorney for the defence and see what 
we can marshal in favour of our client. 

First of all, I submit the fact that advertising has kept many 
artists alive — not that I am thoroughly convinced that artists 
should be kept alive, any more than poets or any other un- 
American breed; but for all that I appeal to your humani- 
tarian instincts when I offer this fact in support of advertising, 
and I trust you will remember it when considering the 
evidence. 

In the second place, advertising is largely responsible for 
the remarkable strides we have taken in the art of typography. 
If you will examine much of the literature produced by adver- 
tising, you will find there many excellent examples of what can 
be done with type. To-day no country in the world is produc- 
ing more artistic and authentic specimens of typography than 



392 CIVILIZATION 

America, and this, I repeat, is largely due to the influence of 
advertising. 

We can also advance as an argument in favour of advertis- 
ing that it has contributed materially to a greater use of the 
tooth-brush and a more diligent application of soap. Adver- 
tising has preached cleanliness, preached frantically, selfishly 
and for its own ends, no doubt, but nevertheless it has preached 
convincingly. It matters little what means are used to achieve 
the end of cleanliness as long as the end is achieved. This, 
advertising has helped to accomplish. The cleanliness of the 
body and the cleanliness of the home as desirable virtues are 
constantly being held up before the readers of papers and 
magazines. As has been said, there are altogether too many 
different makes of soap and other sanitary articles, but in this 
case permit us to modify the statement by adding that it is 
much better to have too many of such articles than too few. 
This third point in favour of advertising is no small point to 
consider. The profession cannot be wholly useless, if it has 
helped to make teeth white, faces clean, bodies healthy, homes 
fresh and sanitary, and people more concerned with their 
bodies and the way they treat them. 

The fourth point in favour of advertising is that through the 
medium of paid space in the papers and magazines certain 
deserving m.ovements have been able to reach a larger public 
and thus recruit from it new and valuable members. This 
example illustrates the value of advertising when applied to 
worthy ends. In all fairness we are forced to conclude, that, 
after all, there is much in advertising that is not totally 
depraved. 

Now that we are about to rest the case, let us gaze once more 
through the magic portals of the advertising world and refresh 
our eyes with its beauty. On second glance we find there is 
something strangely pathetic and wistfully human about this 
World That Never Was. It is a world very much after our 
own creation, peopled and arranged after our own yearnings 
and desires. It is a world of well regulated bowels, cornless 
feet, and unblemished complexions, a world of perfectly fitting 
clothes, completely equipped kitchens, and always upright and 
smiling husbands. To this world of splendid country homes, 



ADVERTISING 393 

humming motors, and agreeable companions, prisoners on our 
own poor weary world of reality may escape for a while to 
live a few short moments of unqualified comfort and happiness. 
Even if they do return from their flight with pockets empty 
and arms laden with a number of useless purchases, they have 
had at least some small reward for their folly. They have 
dwelt and sported with fascinating people in surroundings of 
unsurpassed beauty. True, it is not such a world as Rem- 
brandt would have created, but he was a grim old realist, who, 
when he wanted to paint a picture of a person cutting the nails, 
selected for his model an old and unscrupulous woman, and 
cast around her such an atmosphere of reality that one can 
almost hear the snip of the scissors as it proceeds on its revolt- 
ing business. How much better it would be done in the adver- 
tising world! Here we would be shown a young and beautiful 
girl sitting gracefully before her mirror and displaying just 
enough of her body to convince the beholder that she was 
neither crippled nor chicken-breasted, and all day long for ever 
and for ever she would sit thus smiling tenderly as she clipped 
the pink little moon-flecked nails from her pink little pointed 
fingers. 

Yes, I fear it is a world of our own creation. Only a few 
persons would stand long before Rembrandt's crude example, 
while many would dwell with delight on the curves and allure- 
ments of the maid in the advertising world. Of course one 
might forget or never even discover what she was doing, and 
assuming that one did, one would hardly dwell upon such an 
unromantic occupation in connection with a creature so fair 
and refined as this ideal young woman; but for all that, one 
would at least have had the pleasure of contemplating her love- 
liness. 

So many of us are poor and ill-favoured in this world of 
ours, so many girls are not honestly able to purchase more than 
one frock or one hat a year, that the occasion of the purchase 
takes on an importance far beyond the appreciation of the 
average well-to-do person. It is fun, therefore, to dwell upon 
the lines and features of a perfectly gowned woman and to 
imagine that even though poor and ill-favoured, one might 
possibly resemble in a modified way, the splendid model, if one 



394 CIVILIZATION 

could only get an extra fifteen minutes off at lunch-time in 
order to attend the bargain sale. There are some of us who 
are so very poor that from a great distance we can enjoy with- 
out hope of participation the glory and triumph of others. The 
advertising world supplies us with just this sort of vicarious en- 
joyment, and, like all other kinds of fiction, enables us to play 
for a moment an altogether pleasing role in a world of high 
adventure. 

Therefore let us not be too uncharitable to the advertising 
world. While not forgetting its faults, let us also strive to re- 
member its virtues. Some things we cannot forgive it, some 
things we would prefer to forget, but there are others which 
require less toleration and fortitude to accept when once they 
have been understood. 

As long as the printed word is utilized and goods are bought 
and sold, there will be a place and a reason for advertising — 
not advertising as we know it to-day, but of a saner and more 
useful nature. He would be a doughty champion of the limi- 
tation of free speech who would deny a man the right to tell 
the world that he is the manufacturer of monkey-wrenches, 
and that he has several thousands of these same wrenches on 
hand, all of which he is extremely anxious to sell. 

Advertising, although a precocious child, is but in its infancy. 
In spite of its rapid development and its robust constitution, it 
has not yet advanced beyond the savage and bragging age. It 
will appeal to our instincts of greed as quickly as to our in- 
stincts of home-building. It will make friends with the snob 
that is in us, as readily as it will avail itself of the companion- 
ship of our desire to be generous and well-liked. It will frighten 
and bulldoze us into all sorts of extravagant purchases with 
the same singleness of purpose that it will plead with our self- 
respect in urging us to live cleaner and better lives. It will use 
our pride and vanity for its own ends as coolly as it will use our 
good nature or community spirit. It will run through the whole 
gamut of Imman emotions, selecting therefrom those best suited 
to its immediate ends. Education alone will make the child 
behave — not the education of the child so much as the educa- 
tion of the reader. 

Advertising thrives to-day in the shadows created by big 



ADVERTISING 395 

business, and, as a consequence, if it would retain its master's 
favour it must justify his methods, and practise his evil ways. 
Here it must be added that there are some honest advertising 
agencies which refuse to accept the business of dishonest con- 
cerns. It must also be added that there are some magazines 
and newspapers which will refuse to accept unscrupulous ad- 
vertisements. These advertisementr must be notoriously un- 
scrupulous, however, before they Uicet this fate. There are 
even such creatures as honest manufacturers, but unfortunately 
for the profession they too rarely advertise. As a whole, ad- 
vertising is committed to the ways of business, and as the ways 
of business are seldom straight and narrow, advertising per- 
force must follow a dubious path. We shall let it rest at that. 
We have made no attempt in this article to take up the sub- 
ject of out-door advertising. There is nothing to say about 
this branch of the profession save that it is bad beyond expres- 
sion, and should be removed from sight with all possible haste. 
In revolting against the sign-board, direct action assumes the 
dignity of conservatism, and although I do not recommend an 
immediate assault on all sign-boards, I should be delighted if 
such an assault took place. Were I a judge sitting on the case 
of a man apprehended in the act of destroying one of these eye- 
sores, I should give him the key to my private stock, and ad- 
journ the court for a week. 

J. Thorne Smith 



BUSINESS 

MODERN business derives from three passions in this or- 
der, namely: The passion for things, the passion for 
personal grandeur and the passion for power. Things are mul- 
tiplied in use and possession when people exchange with each 
other the products of specialized labour. Personal grandeur 
may be realized in wealth. Gratification of the third passion 
in this way is new. Only in recent times has business become 
a means to great power, a kind of substitute for kingship, 
wherein man may sate his love of conquest, practise private 
vengeance, and gain dominion over people. 

These passions are feeble on the Oriental side of the world, 
strong in parts of Europe, powerful in America. Hence the 
character of American business. It is unique, wherein it is so, 
not in principle but in degree of phenomena. For natural rea- 
sons the large objects of business are most attainable in this 
country. Yet this is not the essential difference. In the pur- 
suit of them there is a characteristic American manner, as to 
which one may not unreasonably prefer a romantic explana- 
tion. No white man lives on this continent who has not him- 
self or in his ancestry the will that makes desire overt and 
dynamic, the solitary strength to push his dream across seas. 
Islands had been peopled before by this kind of selection, 
notably England; never a continent. A reckless, egoistic, ex- 
perimental spirit governs, betrays, and preserves us still. 

The elemental hunger for food, warmth, and refuge gives 
no direct motive to business. People may live and reproduce 
without business. Civilization of a sort may exist without its 
offices. The settler who disappears into the wilderness with a 
wife, a gun, a few tools, and some pairs of domestic beasts, 
may create him an idyllic habitation, amid orchards and fields, 
self-contained in rude plenty; but he is lost to business until 
he produces a money crop, that is, a surplus of the fruits of 
husbandry to exchange for fancy hardware, tea, window glass, 
muslin, china, and luxuries. 

397 



398 CIVILIZATION 

The American wilderness swallowed up hundreds of thou- 
sands of such hearth-bearers. Business was slow to touch 
them. What they had to sell was bulky. The cost of trans- 
portation was prohibitive. There were no highways, only 
rivers, for traffic to go upon. Food was cheap, because the 
earth in a simple way was bounteous; but the things for which 
food could be exchanged were dear. This would naturally be 
true in a new country, where craft industry must develop 
slowly. It was true also for another reason, which was that 
the Mother Country regarded the New World as a plantation 
to be exploited for the benefit of its own trade and manu- 
factures. 

Great Britain's claim to proprietary interest in America hav- 
ing been established against European rivals by the end of the 
1 7th century, her struggle with the colonists began. The Eng- 
lish wanted ( i ) raw materials upon which to bestow their high 
craft labour, (2) an exclusive market for the output of their 
mills and factories, and (3) a monopoly of the carrying trade. 
The colonists wanted industrial freedom. As long as they 
held themselves to chimney-corner industries, making nails, 
shoes, hats, and coarse cloth for their own use, there was no 
quarrel. But when labour even in a small way began to de- 
vote itself exclusively to handicraft, so that domestic manufac- 
tures were offered for sale in competition with imported Eng- 
lish goods, that was business — and the British Parliament 
voted measures to crush it. The weaving of cloth for sale was 
forbidden, lest the colonists become independent of English 
fabrics. So was the making of beaver hats; the English were 
hatters. It was forbidden to set up an iron rolling-mill in 
America, because the English required pig iron and wished to 
work it themselves. To all these acts of Parliament the col- 
onists opposed subterfuge until they were strong enough to 
be defiant. That impatience of legal restraints which is one 
of the most obstinate traits of American business was then a 
patriotic virtue. 

Meanwhile the New England trader had appeared — that 
adorable, hymning, unconscious pirate who bought molasses 
in the French West Indies, swapped it for rum at Salem, Mass., 
traded the rum for Negroes on the African coast, exchanged the 



J 



BUSINESS 399 

Negroes for tobacco in Virginia, and sold the tobacco for 
money in Europe, at a profit to be settled with God. This 
trade brought a great deal of money to the colonies; and they 
needed money almost more than anything else. Then the 
British laid a ban on trade with the French West Indies, put 
a tax upon coastwise traffic between the colonies; and decreed 
that American tobacco should be exported nowhere but to 
English ports, although — or because — tobacco prices were 
higher everywhere else in Europe. The natural consequence 
of this restrictive British legislation was to make American 
business utterly lawless. As much as a third of it was no- 
toriously conducted in defiance of law. Smuggling both in do- 
mestic and foreign trade became a folk custom. John Han- 
cock, the first signer of the Declaration of Independence, was 
a celebrated smuggler. 

During the War of Independence domestic craft industry 
was stimulated by necessity. But the means were crude and 
the products imperfect; and when, after peace, British mer- 
chants with an accumulation of goods on their hands began to 
offer them for sale in the United States at low prices, hoping 
to recover their new-world trade in competitive terms, the 
infant industries cried out for protection. They got it. One 
of the first acts of the American Congress was to erect a tariff 
against foreign-made goods in order that the country might 
become self-sufficing in manufactures. This was the beginning 
of our protectionist policy. 

Fewer than four million unbusiness-like people coming into 
free possession of that part of the North American continent 
which is named America was a fabulous business event. We 
cannot even now comprehend it. They had not the dimmest 
notion of what it was they were possessed of, nor what it 
meant economically. Geography ran out at the Mississippi. 
The tide of Westward immigration was just beginning to break 
over the crest of the Alleghany mountains. 

Over-seas trade grew rapidly, as there was always a surplus 
of food and raw materials to be exchanged abroad for things 
which American industry was unable to provide. Foreign 
commerce was an important source of group-wealth and public 
interest was much concerned with it. Besides, it was easier 



400 CIVILIZATION 

to trade across seas than inland. Philadelphia until about 
183 s was nearer London than Pittsburgh, not as the crow flies 
but as freight moves. Domestic business, arising from the 
internal exchange of goods, developed slowly, owing partly to 
the wretched state of transportation and partly to the self- 
contained nature of families and communities. The popula- 
tion was more than nine-tenths rural; rural habits survived 
even in the towns, where people kept cows and pigs, cured 
their own meats, preserved their own fruits and vegetables, 
and thought ready-made garments a shocking extravagance. 
Business under these conditions performed a subservient func- 
tion. People's relations with it were in large measure volun- 
tary. Its uses were more luxurious than vital. There was not 
then, nor could any one at this time have imagined, that inter- 
dependence of individuals, groups, communities, and geograph- 
ical sections which it is the blind aim of business increasingly 
to promote, so that at length the case is reversed and people 
are subservient to business. 

In Southern New Jersey you may see a farm, now pros- 
perously devoted to berry and fruit crops, on which, still in 
good repair, are the cedar rail fences built by a farmer whose 
contacts with business were six or eight trips a year over a 
sand road to Trenton with surplus food to exchange for some 
new tools, tea, coffee, and store luxuries. That old sand road 
has become a cement pavement — a motor highway. Each 
morning a New York baking corporation's motor stops at the 
farm-house and the driver hands in some fresh loaves. Pres- 
ently a butcher's motor stops with fresh meat, then another 
one with dry groceries, and yet another from a New York de- 
partment store with parcels containing ready-made garments, 
stockings and shoes. 

Consider what these four motors symbolize. 

First is an automobile industry and a system for producing, 
refining and distributing oil which together are worth as much 
as the whole estimated wealth of America three generations 
ago. 

Back of the bakery wagon what a vista! An incorporated 
baking industry, mixing, kneading, roasting, and wrapping the 
loaf in paraffine paper without touch of human hands, all by 



BUSINESS 401 

automatic machinery. Beyond the Mississippi, in a country 
undiscovered until 1804, the wheat fields that are ploughed, 
sown, reaped by power-driven machinery. In Minnesota a 
milling industry in which the miller has become an impersonal 
flour trust. A railroad system that transports first the grain 
and then the flour over vast distances at rates so low that the 
cost of two or three thousand miles of transportation in the 
loaf of bread delivered to the New Jersey farm-house is in- 
expressible. . . . Back of the butcher's motor is a meat-pack- 
ing industry concentrated at Chicago. It sends fresh meat a 
thousand miles in iced cars and sells it to a New Jersey farmer 
for a price at which he can better afford to buy it than to bother 
about producing it for himself. . . . Back of the grocer's 
motor are the food products and canning industries. By means 
of machinery they shred, peel, hull, macerate, roll, cook, cool, 
and pack fruits, cereals, and vegetables in cartons and con- 
tainers which are made, labelled, and sealed by other auto- 
matic machinery. . . . And back of the department store 
motor are the garment-making, shoe-making, textile, and knit- 
ting industries. 

If one link in all this ramified scheme of business breaks 
there is chaos. If the State of New Jersey were suddenly cut 
off from the offices of business for six months, a third of her 
population might perish; not that the State is unable poten- 
tially to sustain her own, but that the people have formed 
habits of dependence upon others, as others depend upon them, 
for the vital products of specialized labour. 

All this has happened in the life of one cedar rail fence. 
You say that is only fifty or sixty years. Nevertheless it is lit- 
erally so. The system under which we live has been evolved 
since i860. The transformation was sudden. Never in the 
world were the physical conditions of a nation's life altered 
so fast by economic means. Yet it did not happen for many 
years. The work of unconscious preparation occupied three- 
quarters of a century. 

Man acts upon his environment with hands, tools, and imag- 
ination ; and business requires above everything else the means 
of cheap and rapid transportation. In all the major particu- 
lars save one the founders were ill-equipped for their inde- 



402 CIVILIZATION 

pendent attack upon the American environment. At the be- 
ginning of the 19th century there were no roads, merely a few 
trails fit only for horseback travel. There were no canals yet. 
And the labour wherewith to perform heavy, monotonous tasks 
was dear and scarc^ and largely self-employed. Though the 
hands of the pioneer are restless they are not patiently indus- 
trious. There was need of machinery such as had already 
begun to revolutionize British industry, but the English jeal- 
ously protected their mechanical knowledge. 

There is a tradition that the Americans were marvellously 
inventive with labour-saving devices. That is to be qualified. 
Their special genius lay rather in the adaptation and enthusi- 
astic use of such devices. The introduction of them was not 
resisted as in the older countries by labour unwilling to change 
its habits and fearful of unemployment. This was an im- 
portant advantage. 

The American textile industry was founded by British ar- 
tisans who came to this country carrying contraband in their 
heads, that is, the plans of weaving, spinning, and knitting 
machines which the English guarded as carefully as military 
secrets. . . . The pre-eminence of this country in the manu- 
facture and use of agricultural implements is set out in element- 
ary school-books as proof of American inventiveness; yet the 
essential principles of the reaper were evolved in Great Britain 
forty years before the appearance of the historic McCormick 
reaper (1831) in this country, and threshing-machines were in 
general use in England while primitive methods of flailing, 
trampling, and dragging prevailed in America. As recently as 
1850 the scythe and cradle reaped the American harvest and 
there still existed the superstition that an iron plough poisoned 
the soil and stimulated weeds. Of all the tools invented 
or adopted the one which Americans were to make the most 
prodigous use of was the railroad ; yet the first locomotive was 
brought from England in 1829, the embargo on machinery hav- 
ing by this time been lifted — and it failed because it was too 
heavy! 

Twenty years passed and still the possibilities of rail trans- 
portation were unperceived, which is perhaps somewhat ex- 
plained by the fact that the one largest vested interest of that 



BUSINESS 403 

time existed in canals. On the map of 1850 the railroads re- 
semble earthworms afraid to leave water and go inland. The 
notion of a railroad was that it supplemented water transpor- 
tation, connecting lake, canal, and river routes, helping traffic 
over the high places. 

But in the next ten years — 1850 to i860 — destiny surren- 
dered. There was that rare coincidence of seed, weather, deep 
ploughing, and mysterious sanction which the miracle requires. 
The essential power of the American was suddenly liberated. 
There was the discovery of gold in California. There was the 
Crimean War, which created a high demand abroad for our 
commodities. The telegraph put its indignities upon time and 
space. The idea of a railroad as a tool of empire seized the 
imagination. Railroads were deliriously constructed. The 
map of i860 shows a glistening steel web from the seaboard to 
the Mississippi. 

The gigantesque was enthroned as the national fetich. Vo- 
tive offerings were mass, velocity, quantity. True cities began. 
The spirit of Chicago was born. Bigness and be-damnedness. 
In this decade the outlines of our economic development were 
cast for good. 

In the exclusive perspective of business the Civil War is an 
indistinct episode. It stimulated industry in the North, shat- 
tered it in the South. The net result in a purely economic 
sense is a matter of free opinion. The Morse telegraph code 
probably created more wealth than the war directly destroyed. 
Or the bitter sectional row over the route of the first trans- 
continental railroad which postponed that project for ten years 
possibly cost the country more than the struggle to preserve 
the Union. But that is all forgotten. 

After i860 the momentum of growth, notwithstanding the 
war and two terrible panics, was cumulative. In the next fifty 
years, down to 191 o, we built half as much railroad mileage 
as all the rest of the world. Population trebled. This fact 
stands alone in the data of vital statistics. Yet even more re- 
markable were the alterations of human activity. The num- 
ber of city dwellers increased 3^^ times faster than the popula- 
tion; the number of wage-earners, 2 times faster; clerks, sales- 
men, and tj^ists, 63^ times faster; banks, 7 times faster; 



404 CIVILIZATION 

corporations, 6>^ times faster; miners, 3 times faster; trans- 
portation-workers, 20 times faster, and the number of inde- 
pendent farmers decreased. Wealth in this time increased 
from about $500 to more than $1,500 per capita. 

If America in its present state of being had been revealed 
to the imagination of any hard-headed economist in, say, 1850, 
as a mirage or dream, he would have said: " There is in all 
the world not enough labour and capital to do it." He could 
not have guessed how the power of both would be multi- 
plied. 

First there was the enormous simple addition to the labour 
supply in the form of immigration. Then the evolution of 
machinery and time-saving methods incredibly increased the 
productivity of labour per human unit. Thirdly, the applica- 
tion of power to agriculture and the opening of all that virgin 
country west of the Mississippi to bonanza-farming so greatly 
increased the production of food per unit of rural labour that 
at length it required only half the population to feed the whole. 
The other half was free. Business and industry absorbed 
it. 

Of what happened at the same time to capital, in which term 
we include also credit, there could have been no prescience 
at all. Even now when we think of building a railroad, a tele- 
phone system, or an automobile factory the thought is that 
it will take capital, as of course it will at first, but one should 
consider also how anything that increases the velocity with 
which goods are exchanged, or reduces the time in which a 
given amount of business may be transacted, adds to the func- 
tioning power of capital. To illustrate this: the merchant of 
1850 did business very largely with his own capital unaided. 
He was obliged to invest heavily in merchandise stocks. The 
turn-over was slow. His margin of profit necessarily had to 
be large. But with the development of transportation and 
means of communication — the railroad, telegraph, and tele- 
phone — and with the parallel growth of banking facilities, the 
conditions of doing business were fundamentally changed. All 
the time-factors were foreshortened. 

A merchant now has to lock up much less capital in mer- 
chandise, since his stocks are easily and swiftly replenished. 



BUSINESS 405 

The turn-over is much faster because people using suburban 
railways and street-cars go oftener to shop. And not only is 
it possible for these reasons to do a larger volume of business 
with a given amount of capital, but the merchant now borrows 
two-thirds, maybe three-quarters, of his capital at the bank 
in the form of credit. The same is true of the manufacturer. 
Formerly he locked up his capital, first in raw materials and 
then in finished products to be sold in season as the demand 
was; and there was great risk of loss in this way of matching 
supply to an estimated demand. Now he sells his goods be- 
fore he makes them, borrows credit at the bank to buy his raw 
materials, even to pay his labour through the processes of 
manufacture, and when the customer pays on delivery of the 
goods with credit which he also has borrowed at the bank, the 
manufacturer settles with his bank and keeps the difference. 
An exporter was formerly one who bought commodities with 
his own money, loaded them on ship, sent them on chance to 
a foreign market, and waited for his capital to come back 
with a profit. Now he first sells the goods to a foreign cus- 
tomer by cable, then buys them on credit, loads them on ship, 
sells the bill of lading to a bank, uses the proceeds to pay for 
the goods, and counts his profit. All large business now is 
transacted in this way with phantom capital, called credit; 
money is employed to settle differences only. 

The effect of this revolution of methods upon the morals 
and manners of business was tremendous. It destroyed the 
aristocracy of business by throwing the field open to men 
without capital. Traders and brokers over-ran it. The man 
doing business on borrowed capital could out-trade one doing 
business on his own. The more he borrowed, the harder he 
could trade. Salesmanship became a specialized, conscience- 
less art. There was no rule but to take all the traffic would 
bear: let the buyer look out. Dishonesty in business became 
so gross that it had to be sublimated in the national sense of 
humour. There are many still living who remember what 
shopping was like even in the largest city stores when nobody 
dreamed of paying the price first asked and counter-higgling 
was a universal custom. Indeed, so ingrained it was that when 
A. T. Stewart in New York announced the experiment of treat- 



4o6 CIVILIZATION 

ing all buyers alike on a one-price basis his ruin was predicted 
by the whole merchant community. 

As credit both increases competition and enables a larger 
business to be done on a small base of invested capital, the 
margin of profit in business tends to fall. Under conditions 
of intense rivalry among merchants and manufacturers oper- 
ating more and more with phantom capital the margin of 
profit did fall until it was very thin indeed. This led to the 
abasement of goods by adulteration and tricks of manufac- 
ture, which became at length so great an evil that the govern- 
ment had to interfere with pure-food acts and laws forbidding 
wilful misrepresentation. 

There was a limit beyond which the cost of production could 
not be reduced by degradation of quality. It was impossible 
to control prices with competition so wild and spontaneous and 
with cheapness the touchword of success. Therefore the wages 
of business were low, and things apparently had come to an 
impasse. Yet out of this chaos arose what now we know as 
big business. The idea was simple — mass production of 
standardized foods. The small, fierce units of business began 
to be amalgamated. As society is integrated by steps — clan, 
tribe, nation, State — so big business passed through mergers, 
combines, and trusts toward the goal of monopoly. 

When a number of competing manufacturers unite to pro- 
duce standard commodities in quantity, much duplication of 
effort is eliminated, time-saving methods are possible as not 
before, the cost of production is reduced. There are other 
advantages. They are stronger than they were separately, not 
only as buyers of labour, raw materials, and transportation, 
but as borrowers of capital. The individual or firm is the 
customer of a bank. The corporation makes a partnership 
with finance. 

Now a curious thing happens. The corporation with its 
mass production restores the quality of goods. It is responsible 
for its products and guarantees them by brands, labels and 
trade-marks. Sugar and oatmeal come out of the anonymous 
barrel behind the grocer's counter and go into attractive car- 
tons on his shelf, bearing the name of the producer. Gloves, 



BUSINESS 407 

shirts, stockings, cutlery, furniture, meat products, jams, 
watches, fabrics, everything in fact becomes standardized by 
name and price and is advertised by the producer directly to 
the public over the retailer's head, so that the small retailer is 
no longer a merchant in the old sense but a grumbling com- 
mission-man. Big business has delivered itself from the im- 
passe; it has recovered control of its profits; but now the re- 
tailer's margin of profit tends to become fixed. What does the 
retailer do? He applies the same principle to the last act of 
selling. Enter the chain-store. Obviously a corporation own- 
ing a chain of several hundred stores and working, like the 
manufacturer, with borrowed capital, is stronger than any one 
retailer to bargain with the powerful producers, and as the 
chain-store tends to displace the little retailer a balance is 
restored between the business of production and the business 
of retailing. Mass production is met by mass selling. The 
consumer as the last subject may resort to legislation for his 
protection. 

Big business could not have evolved in this way without 
the aid of the railroads. Their dilemma was similar. Strife 
and competition had ruined their profits. To begin with, no- 
body knew what it cost to produce transportation. When a 
new line was opened it made rates according to circumstances. 
At points where it met water competition it charged very little, 
sometimes less than the cost of its fuel, and at points where 
there was no competition it charged all the traffic would stand. 
Then as competitive railroad-building excessively increased the 
high rates steadily fell. Once they got started people were 
obsessed to make railroads. They made them for speculative 
reasons, for feudal reasons, for political reasons, for any reason 
at all. Two men might quarrel in Wall Street, and one would 
build a thousand miles of railroad to spite the other — build it 
with the proceeds of shares sold to the public or hypothecated 
at the bank. Then there would be two roads to divide the 
business of one. Railroads under these conditions were un- 
scientifically planned and over-built. The profit was rather 
in the building than in the working of them. There was scan- 
dal both ways. Quantities of fictitious capital were created 



4o8 CIVILIZATION 

and sold to the public. And when a railroad was built it be- 
came the plaything of its traffic manager, who conspired with 
other traffic managers to sell favours to shippers and to in- 
vent disastrous rate-wars in order to profit by the fall of shares 
on the stock market. 

Rates could not be raised or held up, owing to the irrespon- 
sible nature of the competition. Transportation is a commod- 
ity that cannot be adulterated. How was the profit to be 
restored in this field of business? Why^ by the same method 
as in industry. That is, by mass production. 

Some one discovered that once you got a loaded train out 
of the terminal and rolling on the right-of-way it cost almost 
nothing to keep it moving. There was no money in hauling 
small lots of freight short distances at the highest rates that 
could be charged; but there was profit in moving large quan- 
tities of freight in full cars over long distances at very low 
rates. At this the railroad people went mad over the long, 
heavy haul. Here was industry seeking to concentrate itself 
in fewer places for purposes of mass production; and here were 
the railroads wanting masses of freight to move long distances. 
Their problems coincided. 

Result: mass production gravitates to those far-apart long- 
haul points to get the benefit of low rates, there is congestion 
of industrial population at those points, industry at inter- 
mediate points is penalized by higher freight rates, and the 
railroads henceforth equip themselves with mass tonnage pri- 
marily in view. You begin now to have steel towns, meat 
towns, flour towns, textile towns, garment towns, and so on. 
That interdependence of communities and geographical sec- 
tions which makes business is in full development. 

However, the second state of the railroad is worse than the 
first. It is overwhelmed by the monster it has suckled. It is 
at the mercy of a few big shippers, masters of mass produc- 
tion, who bully it, extort lower and lower rates still, and at 
length secret rebates, under threat of transferring their ton- 
nage to another railroad or in some cases of building their own 
railroad, which now they are powerful enough to do. The rail- 
road yields; and whereas before only such industry as survived 
at intermediate points was penalized by higher freight rates, 



BUSINESS 409 

now all industry outside of big business is at a disadvantage, 
since big business is receiving secret benefits from the railroads. 

There was no philosophy in any of this, not even a high 
order of intelligence. The will of business is anarchistic; its 
rehgion is fatalism. If let alone, it will seek its profit by any 
means that serve and then view the consequences as acts of 
Providence. 

It has been noted that big business, going in for mass pro- 
duction, restored the honesty of goods. The motive was not 
ethical. It paid. The public's good will toward a brand or a 
trade-mark was an asset that could be capitalized, some- 
times for more than plant and equipment, and the shares 
representing such capitalization could be sold to the public on 
the Stock Exchange. But what was gained for morality in the 
honesty of goods was lost again in new forms of dishonesty. 
Standard Oil products were always cheap and honest; its oil 
was never watered. But the means by which the Standard Oil 
Company gained its dangerous trade eminence were dishonest, 
and the trust was dissolved for that reason by the United States 
Supreme Court. It happens to be only the most notable in- 
stance. There were and are still many others — combines and 
trusts whose products are honest but whose tradeways are 
either illegal or ethically repugnant. 

One cannot say that business is either honest or dishonest. 
It is both. Evidence of permanent gain in a kind of intrinsic 
commercial honesty is abundant. Wild-cat banking has dis- 
appeared. A simple book entry between merchants is as good 
as a promissory note. The integrity of merchandise now is a 
trade custom. Vulgar misrepresentations have ceased save in 
the slums of business. The practice of making open prices 
to all buyers alike, wholesale and retail, is universal. It is 
no longer possible to print railroad shares surreptitiously over- 
night and flood the Stock Exchange with them the next morn- 
ing, as once happened in Erie. Nowhere is character more 
esteemed than in business. 

And yet, in spite of all this and parallel with it, runs a bit- 
ter feud between society and business. People are continu- 
ally acting upon big business through the agencies of govern- 
ment to make it behave. What is the explanation? 



4IO CIVILIZATION 

Well, in the first place, the improvement in commercial hon- 
esty has been owing not so much to ethical enlightenment as 
to internal necessity. Big business must do its work on credit; 
there is no other way. Therefore credit is a sacred thing, to 
be preserved by all means. Men know that unless they are 
scrupulous in fulfilling their obligations toward it, the system 
will collapse. As the use of credit increases the code of busi- 
ness become more rigid. It must. One who breaks faith with 
the code is not merely dishonest, man to man; he is an enemy 
of credit. 

If a stock-market coterie of this day could print Erie shares 
without notice and sell them the public would suffer of course 
but Wall Street would suffer much more. Its own affairs 
would fall into hopeless disorder. That kind of thing cannot 
happen again. The code has been improved. You now may 
be sure that anything you buy on the Stock Exchange has been 
regularly issued and listed. No institution is more jealous of 
the integrity of its transactions — transactions as such. Pur- 
chases and sales involving millions are consummated with a nod 
of the head and simple dishonesty is unknown. Nevertheless, 
it is a notorious fact that the amount of money nowadays lost 
on the Stock Exchange by the unwary public is vastly greater 
than in Jay Gould's time. There is, you see, an important dif- 
ference between formal and moral honesty. 

Secondly, business morality is a term without meaning. 
There is no such thing. Business is neither moral nor im- 
moral. It represents man's acquisitive instinct acting outside 
of humanistic motives. Morals are personal and social. Busi- 
ness is impersonal and unsocial. 

So far we come clear. Only now, what shall be said of the 
man in business? He is not a race apart. He may be any of 
us. How then shall we account for the fact that those evils 
and tyrannies of big business with which the Congress, the 
Interstate Commerce Commission, the Department of Justice, 
the Federal Trade Board, and other agencies of the social will 
keep open war are not inhibited at the head by an innate so- 
cial sense? Does the business man lose that sense? Or by 
reason of the material in which he works does he become an 
unsocial being? No. The answer is that the kind of busi- 



BUSINESS 411 

ness we now are talking about is not conducted by men. It is 
conducted by corporations. 

A thing of policy purely, with only legal responsibilities and 
no personality, free from hope of heaven or fear of hell, the 
corporation is both a perfect instrument for the impersonal 
ends of business and a cave of refuge for the conscience. Busi- 
ness by corporations is highly responsible in all that pertains 
to business. Business by corporations is in all ethical respects 
anonymous. A corporation does many things which no one uf 
its directors would do as an individual. The head of a corpora- 
tion says: " If it were my own business, I should handle this 
labour problem very differently. But it isn't. I am a trustee, 
answerable to five thousand stockholders for the security of 
their dividends." Each of the five thousand stockholders says: 
" It isn't my business. I am merely one of a great number of 
stockholders. What can I do about it? " 

Nobody is personally responsible. 

More than two-thirds of our national wealth is owned by 
corporations. They control at some point every process of eco- 
nomic life. Their power is so great that many have wondered 
whether in time it might not overwhelm popular government. 
Yet in all this realm of power there is nowhere that sense of 
personal moral liability which is acknowledged between men 
and without which civilized human relationships would become 
utterly impossible. A corporation is like a State in this respect: 
it cannot, if it would, make moral decisions. The right to do 
that is not delegated by people to a State nor by stockholders 
to a corporation. Both therefore are limited to material deci- 
sions. 

It is probably owing as much to the power-thirsty, law- 
baiting temperament of the American in business as to the 
magnitude of the work to be done that the use of the corpora- 
tion, like the use of labour-saving machinery, has been carried 
further here than in any other country. Railroads naturally 
were the first great corporations. The amount of capital re- 
quired to build a railroad is beyond the resources of any small 
group of individuals ; it must be gathered from a large number, 
who become shareholders. The original railroads were subsi- 
dized by the government with loans of money and enormous 



412 CIVILIZATION 

grants of land. Industrial and trading corporations came 
later. For a long time America was to all corporations a Gar- 
den of Eden. They were encouraged, not precisely that they 
were presumed to be innocent but because they were indis- 
pensable. Then they ate of the Tree of Political Power and 
the feud was on. When people began really to fear them 
their roots were already very deep and touched nearly every- 
thing that was solid. The sinister alliance between big busi- 
ness and high finance was accomplished. 

One of the absurdities of the case was and is that any State 
according to its own laws may grant corporation-charters 
which carry rights of eminent domain in all other states. The 
Standard Oil Company was once dissolved in Ohio. It took 
out a new charter in New Jersey, and went on as before, even 
in Ohio. 

Every attempt to reform their oppressive ways by law they 
have resisted under the constitution as an attack upon the 
rights of property. And there has always been much confu- 
sion as to what the law was. In one case it was construed by 
the United States Supreme Court to mean that bigness itself, 
the mere power of evil, was illegal whether it had been exer- 
cised or not; in another, that each instance must be treated 
on its merits by a rule of reason, and, in still another, that the 
potential power to restrain trade in a monopolistic manner 
was not in itself illegal provided it had never been used. 

Nevertheless the doubt as to which should control the other 
— the State the corporations or the corporations the State — 
has been resolved. Gradually the authority of the State has 
been asserted. The hand of the corporation in national poli- 
tics is branded. The Federal Government's control over the 
rates and practices of the railroads is complete; so likewise is 
the control of many of the several separate States over the 
rates and practices of public-utility corporations. Federal 
authority over the tradeways of the great industrial and trad- 
ing corporations whose operations are either so large or so es- 
sential to economic life as to become clothed with public in- 
terest is far advanced; and supervision of profits is beginning. 

Now what manner of profit and loss account may we write 
with American business? 



BUSINESS 413 

Given to begin with an environment superb, it has made 
wealth available to an aggregate extent hitherto unimaginable 
in the world. But in doing this it has created a conscious, im- 
placable proletariat in revolt against private profit. 

In production it has brought about a marvellous economy of 
human effort. At the same time it has created colossal forms 
of social waste. It wastes the spirit by depriving the indi- 
vidual of that sense of personal achievement, that feeling of 
participation in the final result, which is the whole joy of 
craftsmanship, so that the mind is bored and the heart is 
seared. It wastes all things prodigally in the effort to create 
new and extravagant wants, reserving its most dazzling re- 
wards for him that can make two glittering baubles to sell 
where only one was sold before. It wastes the living machine 
in recurring periods of frightful and unnecessary idleness. 

For the distribution of goods it has perfected a web of ex- 
change, so elaborate that the breaking of one strand is a dis- 
aster and yet so trustworthy that we take its conveniences 
every day for granted and never worry. But the adjustment 
of supply to demand is so rude and uncontrolled that we 
suffer periodic economic calamities, extreme trade depression, 
and social distress, because there has been an over-production 
of some things at a price-impasse between producer and con- 
sumer. 

In the field of finance and credit it has evolved a mechanism 
of the highest dynamic intensity known; yet the speculative 
abuse of credit is an unmitigated scandal, and nothing what- 
ever has been done to eliminate or diminish those alternations 
of high and low prices, inflation and deflation, which produce 
panics and perilous pohtical disorder. On the contrary, busi- 
ness continues fast in the antique superstition that such things 
happen in obedience to inexorable laws. 

In the Great War American business amazed the world, it- 
self included. In 1914 the United States was a debtor nation, 
owing Europe 3 billions of dollars. By the end of 1920 we 
were the largest creditor nation on earth, other nations owing 
us 1 5 billions. This means simply that in six years this coun- 
try produced in excess of its own needs and sent abroad com- 
modities amounting to 18 billions of dollars. In 192 1, to the 



414 CIVILIZATION 

naive astonishment of business, the foreign demand for Amer- 
ican goods slumped because foreign countries had not the 
means to go on buying at any such rate. The result was an 
acute panic in prices here^ trade prostration, unemployment, 
and sounds of despair. The case was stated by leaders of 
business and finance in these ominous terms: "America is 
over-equipped. It has the capacity to produce more of every- 
thing than it needs. Therefore unless we continuously sell our 
surplus abroad, unless the American government will lend for- 
eign countries the credit with which to buy our excess produc- 
tion, prosperity is shattered. Factories will shut up, fields will 
lie fallow, labour will suffer for want of work. Moreover, we 
are threatened with a deluge of foreign goods, for presently 
the countries that owe us i8 billions of dollars will be trying 
to pay us with commodities. If we open our markets to their 
goods our own industries will be ruined. So we must have 
high tariffs to protect American producers from the competi- 
tion of foreign merchandise." 

Ruined by over-plenty! 

We are equipped to produce more of the goods that satisfy 
human wants than we can use, our command over the labour 
of foreign countries by reason of the debt they owe us is enor- 
mous, and business desponds. 

Attend. To keep our prosperity we must sell away our 
surplus, or if necessary give it away to foreign countries on 
credit, and then protect ourselves against their efforts to repay 
us! The simple absurdity of this proposition is self-evident. 
We mention it only for what it signifies. And it signifies that 
business is a blind, momentous sequence, with extravagant re- 
flex powers of accommodation and extension and almost no fac- 
ulty of original imagination. 

American business despairing at over-production and the 
American Indian shivering on top of the Pennsylvania coal- 
fields — these are twin ironies, 

John Law's Mississippi Bubble dream three centuries ago 
was a phantasy of escape from the boredom of toil. The 
bubble itself has been captured. That is the story of Ameri- 
can business. But who has escaped, save always a few at the 
expense of many? There may be in fact no other way. Still, 



BUSINESS 415 

the phantasy will not lie. And nobody knows for sure what 
will happen when business is no longer a feudal-minded thing, 
with rights and institutions apart, seeking its own profit as the 
consummate end, and perceives itself in the light of a subordi- 
nate human function, justified by service. 

Garet Garrett 



ENGINEERING 

AMERICAN engineering made its beginning almost im- 
mediately after the end of the War for Independence. 
The pursuits of the colonists under British domination 
were mainly agricultural. Manufacturing was systematically 
thwarted in order that the Colonies might become a market 
for the finished goods of England. Objection to this form of 
sabotage subsequently developed into one of the main causes 
of the Revolutionary War. It was but natural, therefore, as 
soon as the artificial restrictions imposed upon Colonial en- 
terprise were removed, for the new citizens of America to 
devise machinery, build roads and canals, and plan cities. 

The early engineers who carried on this work were seldom 
formally trained. They were little more than higher types of 
artisans. It was only after thirty-odd years of discussion and 
agitation that the first scientific schools were established in 
this country — two in number. And it was only after the en- 
actment of the Morrill Act by Congress (1862) that formal 
engineering training as we know it to-day was put on a firm 
national basis. By 1870, 866 engineers had been graduated 
from American technical schools and colleges. The real ad- 
vent of the typical American engineer, however, has only oc- 
curred since 1870. At present he is being supplied to the in- 
dustries of the country at the rate of 5,000 a year. 

The coming of the formally trained technologist or scientist 
of industry lagged somewhat behind the development of the 
industrial revolution. This was particularly true in Amer- 
ica. Originally all attention was centered on the training of 
so-called civil engineers, i.e., canal, bridge, road, dam and 
building designers and constructors. The rapid rise of the me- 
chanical arts after the Civil War focused attention on the 
training of engineers expert in manufacturing. To-day the 
mechanical and electrical engineers are more numerous than 
any other group and have far outstripped the civil engineers. 

417 



4i8 CIVILIZATION 

The original function of the engineer, especially in the first 
days of his systematic training, was to deal scientifically with 
purely mechanical problems. Thus the oft quoted definition 
of the British Institution of Civil Engineers that " Engineer- 
ing is the art of directing the great sources of power in na- 
ture for the use and convenience of man " reveals quite clearly 
the legitimate field within which the engineer was supposed to 
operate. He was to harness the untamed energies of nature. 
That this conception was then sufficient, and that the careers 
of most engineers were shaped accordingly, is hardly to be dis- 
puted. Nor, judging from the achievement of American en- 
gineers in the last fifty years, can it be contended that their 
function was conceived in too narrow a light. Undoubtedly, 
the problems of mechanical production, power-creation and 
transmission, bridge and building construction, and railway 
and marine transportation, during this period were largely ma- 
terial ones, and the opportunities for their solution were espe- 
cially good. To these the engineers directed their attention. 
Thanks to their training, technique, and accumulated experi- 
ence, they became more and more successful in solving them. 
At the same time, their relative freedom of thought and action 
with reference to technological problems brought them into 
more or less coherent groups which, as time went on, began to 
conceive a larger function for the engineer — service to society 
as a whole rather than the solving of mere concrete, specific 
difficulties. 

For while the material problems of production are undoubt- 
edly as important as ever, the present-day industrial system 
has begun to reveal new problems which the engineer in Amer- 
ica has, to a limited extent, come to realize must be faced. 
These new problems are not material in the old sense of the 
word; they concern themselves with the control and adminis- 
tration of the units of our producing system. Their nature is 
psychological and economic. 

Certain groups in the American engineering profession have 
become quite conscious that these deeper problems are not be- 
ing solved; at the same time they consider it a necessary duty 
to help in their solution, inasmuch as the engineer, they feel, 
is peculiarly fitted to see his way clearly through them. Thus 



ENGINEERING 419 

is being split off from the main body of old-line engineers, a 
new wing not so much concerned with wringing power from 
nature as with adjusting power to legitimate social needs. As 
against the old engineer, concerned primarily with design and 
construction, there is to be recognized the new engineer, con- 
cerned mainly with industrial management. 

Unfortunately, however, a strict evaluation of the engineer's 
status with reference to the influence he may have on the solu- 
tion of these social and economic problems causes serious 
doubts to arise regarding his ultimate possibilities in this field. 
Despite his great value and recognized indispensability as a 
technologist, expert in problems of materials and processes of 
manufacture, he can at best but serve in an advisory capacity 
on questions affecting the division of the national surplus or 
the control of industry. Nevertheless, it is of fundamental 
significance that the American engineering profession has of 
late considerably widened the scope of the British Institution 
of Civil Engineers' definition of engineering^ namely, to the 
effect that " Engineering is the science of controlling the forces 
and utilizing the materials of nature for the benefit of man and 
the art of organizing and of directing human activities in con- 
nection therewith" The implications of this much broader 
definition, if widely accepted, will bring the American engi- 
neers sooner or later squarely before a fundamental issue. 

The ideal of service is profoundly inherent in the profession 
of engineering. But so, also, is the ideal of creative work. 
The achievements of engineering enterprise are easily visualized 
and understood, and from them the engineer is wont to derive 
a great deal of satisfaction. Recently, however, the exactions 
of the modern complex economic system, in which the engineer 
finds himself relatively unimportant compared with, say, the 
financier, have contrived to rob him of this satisfaction. And 
as his creative instincts have been thwarted, he has turned 
upon business enterprise itself a sharp and inquiring eye. 
From isolated criticisms of wastes and inefficiencies in indus- 
try, for instance, he has not found it a long or difficult step to 
the investigation of industry on a national basis for the pur- 
pose of exposing technical and managerial shortcomings. 

It appears, however, that the majority of American engi- 



420 CIVILIZATION 

neers to-day believe that their position as a class is such that 
they can effectively maintain an impartial position when dif- 
ferences which arise between large economic groups of society 
such as those of the merchant, the manufacturer, the labourer, 
the farmer, although these differences frequently lead to eco- 
nomic waste and loss. At all events, it is on this basis that 
attempts are being made to formulate a general policy for 
engineers as a class to pursue. It is very doubtful, however, 
whether a group such as the engineers, constituting the " indis- 
pensable general staff of industry," can long take an impartial 
attitude towards two such conflicting forces as capital and 
labour so long as they (the engineers) adhere to the ideal of 
maximum service and efficiency. The pickets of the fence 
may eventually prove unduly sharp. 

A minority group which believes otherwise has already or- 
ganized into an international federation of technicians affili- 
ated with the standard organized labour movement of America. 
This group holds that the engineer is a wage-earner like all 
other industrial workers, and that his economic welfare in many 
instances is no better than that of ordinary wage-earners. 
In addition, this group maintains that in the last analysis it is 
flatly impossible for engineers to take an impartial attitude in 
the struggle between capital and labour. Hence they advocate 
the engineer affiliating with the organized labour movement 
like other wage earners and, in times of crisis, throwing his in- 
fluence with the workers of industry. 

The organized labour movement of America has indicated 
in clear terms its estimate of the American engineer's true 
value and opportunity. The American Federation of Labour 
in 1 91 9 issued the following statement: 

" To promote further the production of an adequate supply of the 
world's needs for use and higher standards of life, we urge that there 
be established co-operation between the scientist of industry and the 
representatives of the organized workers." 

This conviction has also been expressed in the following 
terms: 

'' The trades-union movement of America understands fully the 
necessity for adequate production of the necessities of life. Ameri- 



ENGINEERING 421 

can labour understands, perhaps more fully than do American states- 
men, the needs of the world in this hour, and it is exerting every 
effort to see that those needs are met with intelligence and with 
promptness. The question of increased productivity is not a ques- 
tion of putting upon the toilers a more severe strain; it is a question 
of vast fundamental changes in the management of industry; a ques- 
tion of the elimination of outworn policies; a question of the intro- 
duction of the very best in machinery and methods of management." 

The fundamental significance of these attitudes of the en- 
gineers and the organized vi^orkers of the country vi'ill perhaps 
be better understood when it is realized how indispensable the 
engineers have become in the conduct of industrial affairs 
to-day. While virtually the product of the last fifty years, 
they have already fallen heir to one of the most strategic posi- 
tions in society. To them are entrusted the real '' trade se- 
crets " of industry. Only they understand how far the intricate 
material processes of manufacture are interdependent, and how 
they can be kept in harmony. The engineers have the skill 
and the understanding which is absolutely necessary for indus- 
trial management. Without their guidance the present highly 
complicated system of production would quickly tumble into 
chaos. 

The ownership of industry has frequently been suggested 
as the key to the true emancipation of the great mass of work- 
ers of a nation. Leastwise many theoretical arguments on 
the process of workers' liberation have been premised on the 
necessity of eventually liquidating the institution of private 
property. How futile such a programme is without recogniz- 
ing the indispensable part which technical and managerial 
skill plays in any system of production has been emphasized 
again and again by individuals, notably in Russia and Italy, 
where the experiment of securing production without the 
assistance of adequate technical control has been tried. In 
fact, the whole question of property control is secondary when 
once the true value of engineering management is understood. 
In so far as the American workers see this, and make it pos- 
sible for American engineers to co-operate with them in their 
struggle for liberation, will they make the task of the worker 
more easy and avoid the frequent recurrence of wasteful and 



422 CIVILIZATION 

often tragic conflict. The burden, however, is equally upon 
the shoulders of the engineer to meet labour half way in this 
enterprise. 

It is very much to be doubted if most American engineers 
really have a clear understanding of the position in which 
they find themselves, beyond a general conception of their 
apparent impartiality. The progressive economic concepts 
and activities which have been outlined, while advanced by 
representatives of national associations of engineers, are not 
necessarily the reflection of the great mass of American en- 
gineers to-day, over 200,000 strong. Nevertheless, it is for- 
tunate that an otherwise conservative and socially timid body 
of individuals, such as the engineers frequently have been in 
the past, should now find itself represented by a few spokes- 
men at least who are able to promulgate clear statements on 
fundamental issues. The rank and file of engineers have a 
long road to travel before they w^ill be in a position to com- 
mand adequate consideration for their basic ideals and pur- 
poses as expressed in their new definition of engineering, and 
as proposed by some of their leaders. 

It is, indeed, seriously to be doubted if many engineers 
of America have really had the training to grasp the relation 
of their position to the economic developments of to-day. 
Conventional engineering education has been entirely too nar- 
row in its purpose. It has succeeded in turning out good 
technical practitioners, not far-seeing economic statesmen. In 
recent years many engineering schools have placed emphasis 
on what has aptly been termed " The business features of engi- 
neering practice." This, while conceivably a good thing from 
the standpoint of the limits within which engineering enterprise 
must ordinarily function to-day, is bound to over-emphasize 
the status quo, and so confine the vision of the engineer. 

Engineers in this country have frequently taken a sort of 
Pharisaic attitude on the desirability — offhand — of delegating 
the entire running of things human to technical experts. While 
such experts may usually have been quite successful in operat- 
ing engineering enterprises, it hardly follows that this neces- 
sarily qualifies them for the wholesale conduct of the affairs of 
society. 



ENGINEERING 423 

Yet the demand on the part of certain engineers for a more 
fundamental participation in the conduct of the larger eco- 
nomic and political affairs of society should be construed as 
a healthy sign. It is an outgrowth of an intellectual unrest 
among the profession, precipitated by the thwarting of a genu- 
ine desire to build and serve. This unrest, in the absence of 
a constructive outlet combined with the past failure of engi- 
neering education to provide a real intellectual background, 
has resulted from time to time in some amusing phenomena. 
Thus not a few engineers have developed a sort of symbolism 
or mysticism, expressed in the terminology of their profession, 
with a view to building a new heaven and a new earth whose 
directing head they propose to be. From this they derive a 
peculiar satisfaction and perhaps temporary inspiration, and 
incidentally they often seem to confound laymen who do not 
understand the meaning of their terms. Instead of deriving 
comfort from symbolic speculations and futurist engineering 
diagrams, one would rather expect engineers to be realists, 
especially in the larger affairs of their profession. The serious- 
ness with which the speculations concerning " space-binding " 
and " time-binding " have been taken is an example of how 
engineers with their present one-sided intellectual development 
may seize upon metaphysical cobwebs for spiritual solace in 
their predicament. 

Another aspect of the intellectual limitations of many Ameri- 
can engineers is revealed by some of the controversies which 
engage the technical societies and the technical periodicals. 
A notable and recurring instance is the debate concerning the 
relative merits of steam and electrical operation of railways. 
The real question which underlies replacing a going system 
with one which is better but more costly in capital outlay is 
primarily economic in nature. Consequently such a change is 
contingent upon a revised distribution of the national surplus 
rather than on the comparative merits of detail parts. This 
fact seldom seems to get home to the engineers. They have 
been arguing for the last fifteen years the relative advantages 
of this or that detail, failing all the while to understand that 
the best, in the large, from an engineering standpoint, can 
be secured only when unrestricted, free enterprise has given 



424 CIVILIZATION 

way to some form of enterprise regulated principally in the 
interest of public service. 

The profession of engineering, especially in America, is still 
young enough not to have become ridden with tradition and 
convention. It has developed rapidly along essentially prag- 
matic though perhaps narrow lines. Certainly it is not bound 
and circumscribed by precedent and convention like the legal 
profession, or even the medical profession. Above all, it de- 
rives its inspiration from powerful physical realities, and this 
constitutes its bulwark. 

What the profession really lacks are two fundamentals, ab- 
solutely necessary for any group strategically located and 
desirous of leadership in society. These are: (i) an intel- 
lectual background based squarely upon a comprehensive study 
of the economic and political institutions of society, their his- 
tory, growth, and function, together with a study of the larger 
aspects of human behaviour and rights; and, (2) the develop- 
ment of a facility for intelligent criticism, especially of engi- 
neering and economic enterprises. A wholesome intellectual 
background is necessary to interpret the new position and its 
prerogatives which the application of science has created for 
the engineer. A development of the critical faculty is de- 
sirable in order to enable him to detect the blandishments of 
cult, the temptations of formulas and systems expressed in 
indefinable abstractions, and the pitfalls of the status quo. 

The responsibility for the American engineer's function in 
society rests largely upon the schools which train him. Engi- 
neering education in America has done its task relatively well 
considered from the simple technical point of view. Of late, 
progressive engineering educators have stressed the necessity 
for paying more attention to the humanistic studies in the engi- 
neering curriculum. The beginning made in this respect is, 
however, entirely too meagre to warrant much hope that 
younger American engineers will soon acquire either that in- 
tellectual background or genuine critical faculty which will 
entitle them to a larger share of responsibility for the affairs 
of men. 

The most hopeful sign in this direction is rather the fusion 
of the engineers into a large federation of societies, with 



ENGINEERING 425 

service to the community, State, and Nation as their motto; 
a growing tendency, collectively, at least, to investigate the 
conduct of national industrial enterprises; and, finally, an at- 
tempt at a rapprochement, in the interest of society, between 
labour and the engineers. Ere long these developments will 
reflect themselves in the schools of engineering, and then, it is 
reasonable to expect, will the process of developing a truly 
worthy class of industrial leaders in this country really make 
its beginning. In America to-day no such leadership exists. 

O. S. Beyer, Jr. 



NERVES 

YOUNG as America is, she is nevertheless old enough to 
have known the time when there were no such things 
as nerves. Our earliest settlers and colonists, our proverbially- 
hardy pioneers apparently managed to get along with a very 
modest repertory of diseases. They died, if not from malnu- 
trition or exposure or from Indians, then from some old- 
fashioned, heaven-sent seizure or sudden pain, not to mention 
from " old age," long a favourite diagnosis of a pious and 
not too inquisitive school of medicine even where the patient's 
age had to be entered by the coroner as of forty or there- 
abouts. As for the various forms of nervousness which belong 
to our age of indulgence and luxury, they were unknown^o 
those sturdier times, and would undoubtedly have put their 
unhappy victims under the quick suspicion of having had for- 
bidden converse with the Devil. 

If, nevertheless, we feel justified in assuming that this 
golden age of health and disease probably hid beneath its tinsel 
a good many of the nervous afflictions which had already 
made the IMiddle Ages so interesting, we must bear in mind 
that the pioneer neurotic of those days had at his command a 
number of disguises and evasions to which his fellow-sufferer 
of to-day can no longer have recourse. One of his favourite 
expedients for concealing his neurotic maladjustment was to 
take refuge in some form of religion or rather in some new 
variation of religious belief or practice, for it is, of course, 
not claimed here that religion itself can be exhaustively ex- 
plained as a manifestation of nervous maladjustment. But the 
colonial period was an era when it was still good form, so 
to speak, for a neurosis to express itself in some religious 
peculiarity, and as this was a country without monasteries 
(which had proved to be such a haven for the neurotically 
afflicted during the Middle Ages), the neurotic was forced to 
exhibit his neo-religionism in the open. Often he blossomed 

427 



428 CIVILIZATION 

forth in some new form of religious segregation, which allowed 
him to compensate for his social defect and often gave him 
positive advantages. 

The neurotic legacy which he thus bequeathed to the nation 
can still be seen all around us to-day in the extraordinary 
multiplicity of religious variations, not to say eccentricities, 
which dot the theological heavens in America. For the neu- 
rotic as a religion founder — or better, inventor — quickly gath- 
ered similarly inclined adherents, formed a sect, and moved a 
little further West, so that the country was rather plentifully 
sown with strange creeds. He was thus freed from the criti- 
cism which would have overtaken him in a more settled so- 
ciety and his neurotic disguise remained undetected to a degree 
no longer possible to-day. For if nowadays we still occasion- 
ally encounter a brand-new and crassly individual religion all 
registered and patented like any temperance elixir, we usually 
discover that its prophet is either a defective or even an illiter- 
ate person who has distorted some biblical text in favour of 
a bizarre interpretation, or else a psychopathic individual who 
already has highly systematized ideas of the delusioned tj^e. 
This class of neurotic has tended to disappear by somewhat 
the same process through which the more flamboyant tj^De of 
hysteric such as flourished in the Middle Ages has gradually 
succumbed to progressive exposure — an analogy to which I 
refer with some diffidence in the face of one of the supreme 
ironies of the 20th century, namely, the canonization of Joan 
of Arc. But that lapse into the darkness of medisevalism is 
probably to be explained as a by-product of the war mind. 

The other great loophole for the early American neurotic 
was purely geographical. He could always move on. In view 
of the tendency towards social avoidance so characteristic of 
the neurotic, this was of inestimable advantage. It is, of 
course, generally supposed that when the embryonic American 
trekked Westward it was either in response to some external 
pressure of political oppression or religious intolerance or to 
the glad, free call of wider horizons and more alluring oppor- 
tunities, as was the case with the earliest colonists in their flight 
from Europe. In both cases, however, the assumption may be 
challenged as a sufficient explanation. For it is extremely 



NERVES 429 

probable that a good many of these pioneers were, like Mr. 
Cohan's " Vagabond," fugitives from their own thoughts quite 
as much as from the tyranny of others. They felt an urge 
within them that made a further abidance in their social envi- 
ronment intolerable. This geographical flight of the neurotic 
has always been the most natural and the most obvious, 
checked though it is to-day to a large extent by the disappear- 
ance of further virgin territory and the sophistication born 
of the knowledge wrought by a world-wide intercommunication 
which says that mankind is everywhere much the same, a truth 
which can again be translated into an internal realization that 
we cannot escape from ourselves. 

Certainly our pioneers have been too much romanticized. 
The neurotic legacy which they bequeathed to us can plainly 
be seen in many characteristics of our uncouth Westerners with 
their alternate coldness towards visitors and their undignified 
warmth towards the casual stranger who really cannot mean 
anything to them. There is something wrong about man as a 
social animal when he cannot live happily in a valley where 
he sees more than the distant smoke of his neighbour's chim- 
ney. When at last the pressure of population forces him to 
live socially his suspicion and distrust are likely to turn him 
into a zealot and reformer and make possible the domination 
in American life of such a sub-cultural type as Bryan or the 
beatitudes of a State like Kansas. The favourite Western 
exhortation to be able to look a man in the eye and tell him 
to go to Hell is worthy of an anti-social community of ex- 
convicts, and the maxim about minding your own business can 
only be understood as a defence against the prevalent tendency 
of everybody to mind his neighbour's business. Thus the self- 
isolating neurotic ends by revenging himself upon society by 
making it intolerable. 

But this is to anticipate. It must be said that until after 
the Civil War America remained singularly free from " nerves." 
This is perhaps largely due to the fact, as I have tried to show, 
that they were not known as such. The only serious epidemic 
was the witchcraft hunting of the 1 7th century. It is certainly 
most charitable towards a religion which had so many other 
repellent features to characterize this as an hysterical epidemic 



430 CIVILIZATION 

and let it go at that, though it also freshly illustrates the time- 
worn truth that intolerance does not seem to make its victims 
any more tolerant in their turn. The passing of this epidemic 
also marked the last irruption of State intolerance towards reli- 
gion, with the exception of later incidents in connection with 
the Mormon Church, though it has rarely been understood that 
especially in this country State tolerance of religion was com- 
pensated for by individual and social intolerance in matters 
that quite transcended the religious sphere. The vast impor- 
tance of this phenomenon in relation to our modern nervous 
tension will be referred to again later on. 

The first typical manifestation of American nerves on an 
imposing scale began to develop in the sixties and seventies of 
the last century in the form of neurasthenia. Until then the 
typical American, despite his religious obsessions and his social 
deficiencies, had, to a large extent, remained externally minded, 
a fact which is sufficiently attested by his contempt for the 
arts and his glorification of his purely material achievements. 
He had been on the make, an absorbing process while it lasts, 
though rather dangerous in the long run because it never comes 
to an end. Neurasthenia developed rapidly as soon as it had 
been properly labelled, and claimed a notable number of vic- 
tims among our captains of industry and high-pressure men: 
indeed, the number might easily lead to the perhaps rather 
unkindly conclusion that business dishonesty, even though suc- 
cessful, is likely to result in nervous breakdown in a genera- 
tion piously reared on the unimpeachable maxims of a Ben- 
jamin Franklin or a Herbert Smiley. More fundamentally 
it was, of course, the logical penalty for cultivating the purely 
energetic side of man at the expense of his contemplative na- 
ture. The philosophy of hurry and hustle had begun to totter. 

The discoverer, expounder, and popularizer of neurasthenia 
was Doctor George M. Beard, under whose aegis neurasthenia 
came to be known as " the American disease." Dr. Beard 
was a sound neurologist within the limits of his generation 
of medicine, but with a dangerous gift of imagination. His 
conception of neurasthenia was truly grandiose. According 
to him this fascinating disease was endemic in the United 
States and was the result of our peculiar social conditions. Its 



NERVES 431 

cause, he claimed, was " modern civilization, which has these 
five characteristics — steam power, the periodical press, the 
telegraph, the sciences, the mental activity of women." Among 
the secondary and tertiary causes of neurasthenia or nervous- 
ness he threw in such things as climate, the dryness of our 
air and the extremes of heat and cold, civil and religious lib- 
erty, our institutions as a whole, inebriety, and the general 
indulgence of our appetites and passions. In a remarkable 
chapter he also assigned as one of the causes of our nervous- 
ness the remarkable beauty of American women, though he 
does not clearly state whether this made only the men nervous 
or the women as well. Such a diagnosis was to turn sociologist 
with a vengeance and Doctor Beard lived up to his implica- 
tions by saying that the cure of neurasthenia would mean " to 
solve the problem of sociology itself." 

The inevitable result of such a broad and confident diagnosis 
was to make of neurasthenia a kind of omnium gatherum of 
all the ills of mankind less obvious than a broken leg. To 
explain the affliction in terms of America rather than in terms 
of the patient and his symptoms had about the value of a for- 
eigner's book about America written on his home-bound 
steamer after a six-weeks' sojourn in this country. In fact, 
the wildest diagnoses were made, and such perfectly well- 
defined medical entities as tabes, arteriosclerosis, parathyroid- 
ism, myasthenia, and incipient tumours of the brain were fre- 
quently given the neurasthenic label. Various theories of 
exhaustion and nervous strain were also advanced and the 
attempt was made to feed and strengthen the nervous system 
directly on the analogy of Professor Agassiz's famous assump- 
tion that the phosphates in fish could be directly absorbed as 
material for brain-cells, a theory which did not account for 
the fact that comparatively few intellectual giants have sprung 
from fisher-folk. This naturally opened up a wide field for 
quackery and ushered in the era of " nerve tonics " which are 
still with us to-day. The craze for sanitariums also started at 
about this time, and with every doctor having a little sani- 
tarium of his own the public was pretty well fleeced both by 
its " medicine men " and its men of medicine. 

Of course no treatment could possibly be successful in cur- 



432 CIVILIZATION 

ing such a wide variety of diseases the very existence of many 
of which was hidden from the physician under the blanket 
term of neurasthenia; and in those cases where an actual neu- 
rasthenia was present the treatment as developed by Beard 
and his followers made only superficial progress. The S. Weir 
Mitchell formula, for instance^ with its emphasis upon quiet, 
diet, and rest, remained, in the majority of cases, essentially 
a treatment of symptoms rather than of causes. The tired 
and over-wrought business man was given a pacifying vaca- 
tion from his dubious labours and was then promptly sent back 
to them, like a dog to his vomit. The American woman, grown 
nervous from being insufficiently occupied, was initiated into 
a different form of doing nothing, whereat she felt much re- 
lieved for a time. Neurasthenia was soon moving in a vicious 
and ever- widening circle; the more it spread the more it had 
to include and thus became less and less digested medically; 
it played havoc especially among American women who ex- 
ploited their " nervousness " much as their European sisters 
had exploited their " migraine " or their " vapours " in previous 
generations. By the nineties, however, neurasthenia had run 
its course as a fashionable affliction, other countries had suc- 
ceeded in surviving without erecting a quarantine against it, 
and medical circles had begun to debate whether there was 
such a thing as neurasthenia at all. 

But, despite the breakdown of neurasthenia and the sins 
that were committed in its name, it would be a mistake to be 
merely amused at Doctor Beard for the pretentiousness of his 
concept or to criticize him too severely for being too much of 
a medical popularizer. His insight was, after all, of consid- 
erable value. For he realized, however imperfectly, that the 
TJIburoses as a class are cultural diseases and that they cannot 
be properly understood without taking into account the back- 
ground of modern civilization. This is a rare virtue in Ameri- 
can medicine where the specialist is constantly in danger of 
isolating himself, a tendency which is particularly harmful in 
the study of the mental sciences. Unfortunately Doctor Beard 
did not follow through. He seems to have become frightened 
at his own diagnosis. For no sooner had he drawn the worst 
possible picture of American civilization as a breeder of neu- 



NERVES 433 

rasthenia than he turned around and assured the public that 
things were not so bad after all. He accomplished this by 
enriching his sociology with a philosophy which is a prodigy 
in itself. This philosophy of his he called the " omnistic phi- 
losophy " and claimed for it the peculiar virtue of being able to 
include '' optimism on the one hand and pessimism on the 
other and make the best of both," which is undoubtedly as 
uplifting a piece of American metaphysics as one is likely to 
find on the whole Chautauqua circuit. In criticizing the slow 
advance of American medicine as a whole it is always well to 
remember the atmosphere of intellectual quackery in which 
our physicians no less than our early metaphysicians so con- 
fidently moved. 

By the end of the 19th century the study of functional nerv- 
ous disorders in America was, as I have said, pretty well strewn 
with the disjecta membra of neurasthenia which still breathed 
slightly under the stimulus of electro- and hydrotherapeutics 
and of the " health foods " industry. Meanwhile hypnotism 
also had come to do its turn upon the American medical stage, 
where it ran through a swift cycle of use and abuse. Neurol- 
ogy as a special department, like the rest of American medi- 
cine, had been greatly enriched by contact with continental 
medicine, and the works of Kraepelin had come into honour 
among the psychiatrists. Dr. Morton Prince had begun to 
publish some interesting studies of double personalities, and 
a number of tentative systems of psycho-therapy based on a 
rather mixed procedure had been set up only to be knocked 
down again as a beneficial exercise for the critical faculty. 

But now the stage was set for the appearance of the two 
modern theories of the neuroses as presented in Europe by 
Janet and Freud. In the rivalry that immediately ensued h^ 
tween these two opposing theories that of Janet was soon out- 
distanced. His fundamental conception of hysteria as a form 
of degeneration was in a way quite as repugnant to American 
optimism as the sexual interpretation of Freud was to Ameri- 
can prudery. Janet had indeed been of invaluable help to 
the hysteric by taking him seriously, but his presentation of 
the subject was so narrow and his theory in the end proved 
so static that his views have made little headway. Janet was 



434 CIVILIZATION 

also under the disadvantage of working as an isolated figure 
in a prescribed field and did not come into any revolutionary 
relation to psychology as a whole or find those immensely sug- 
gestive analogies in the field of psychiatry, especially in demen- 
tia praecox and paranoia, which have given the work of Freud 
such a wide range. He had, besides, the defects common 
to so much of French medicine which is often so peculiarly 
insular and, so to speak, not made for export. His contribu- 
tion more or less began and ended with the theory of the dis- 
sociation of the personality which is not characteristic of hys- 
teria alone and could not successfully be grafted upon the old 
psychology to which Janet clung. 

On the other hand, Freud after an initial resistance rapidly 
became epidemic in America. As was the case in Europe, he 
enjoyed considerable vogue among the lay public while still 
violently opposed in medical circles. His visit to America, 
however, in 1909, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary 
of Clark University, created a very favourable impression and 
brought him to the attention of such American psychologists as 
William James, Edwin B. Holt, Adolf Meyer, and others. His 
works appeared in this country in translations by Doctor A. A. 
Brill, and in a short while Freud was " taken up " with a 
vengeance. 

He has had both the advantages and the handicaps of a 
boom. His admirers have obscured or exaggerated him and 
his enemies have derided his popularity as proof of a reputa- 
tion based upon sensationalism. In fact, Freud met with three 
fates: he was either wildly embraced, or rejected in toto with 
an appropriate academic lynching, or else he was accepted with 
" improvements." 

He was fortified by previous experience against the second 
alternative and probably resigned to the third: it was the em- 
brace that most nearly proved fatal to him. For America 
was to see the most extravagant development of the so-called 
" wild " psychoanalysis, a danger against which Freud him- 
self had issued a warning. In 191 6, for instance, an informal 
canvas revealed that approximately five hundred individuals 
were quite willing to psychoanalyze patients in the city of New 
York alone, whereas there were probably not more than six 



NERVES 435 

properly qualified medical practitioners in the whole State. 
Advertisements offered to teach the psychoanalytic technique 
by mail and instructors in chiropractic included it in their 
curriculum. This gross abuse was due to the general laxness 
of medical law in this country which still remains to be reme- 
died. It was not only the amateurs that offended; doctors 
themselves were often at fault. For it cannot be too often 
emphasized that a psychoanalyst must have something more 
than the conceit of psychological subtlety common to most of 
us; he must be a trained neurologist and must have had consid- 
erable experience in psychiatry if he would escape the pitfalls 
of differential diagnosis — a case of hysteria can be dangerously 
like an incipient tumour of the brain and a compulsion-neurosis 
may simulate a paranoid condition. These abuses are, of 
course, no criticism of the intrinsic value of psychoanalysis. 
It has been the history of so many medical discoveries that 
they are recommended as a cure-all ; we need but recall vacci- 
nation, or the present vitamine craze. On the other hand, it 
is regrettable that the direct attack upon Freud in this country 
has rarely risen above the level of denunciation. Quite re- 
cently, for instance, one of our socially eminent neurologists 
allowed himself to indulge in the teleological, or rather dis- 
guised theological, argument that if the unconscious is really 
so full of dreadful things as Freud says, they should be left 
there. And yet it is just serious and sympathetic criticism 
of which the science of psychoanalysis stands most in need. 

The attempts to assimilate Freud were of two kinds. The 
first of these, like Professor Holt's book on " The Freudian 
Wish " or Doctor Edward J. Kempf 's " The Autonomic Func- 
tions and the Personality," were sincere attempts of critical 
dignity to relate psychoanalysis to American behaviouristic psy- 
chology on the part of men who are not altogether professed 
Freudians. The second were more in the nature of somewhat 
pompous criticisms which attempted to reconcile and soften 
what seemed to be the more repellent features of the Freudian 
theories. There is a prevalent tendency among medical men 
in America to indulge in criticism without any due regard to 
the proportions between the magnitude of a subject and their 
familiarity with it, somewhat after the manner of the green 



436 CIVILIZATION 

theological student who is confident of his ability to subvert 
the theory of evolution in a casual thesis of his own. The 
scientist in many fields is constantly facing this debasement of 
standards, making science not too scientific or logic not too 
logical lest it should be misunderstood; it is certainly a com- 
mentary that the majority of Americans, for instance, look 
upon Edison as our greatest scientist. The tendency to 
sweeten and refine Freud has taken some peculiar forms, due, 
in great part, to Doctor Jung who, on having re-introduced 
the libido theory to American audiences with a number of 
philosophical and mystical trimmings of his own, felt that he 
had made Freud more palatable over here. 

Ironically enough, it would have been a very simple matter 
to " put over " Freud in this country with all the eclat of the 
Bergsonian craze which just preceded him. It was merely 
a question of the right kind of publicity, for the problem of 
how to handle sex in America has been solved long ago. The 
way to do it is to sentimentalize it. If Freud, instead of say- 
ing that the incestuous longing of the child for the parent of 
opposite sex is a natural impulse, though normally sublimated 
during the period of adolescence, had put the same idea into 
the phraseology of so many of our popular songs which re- 
iterate the theme about mother being her boy's first and last 
and truest love, he would have encountered no opposition. 
And if he had given his theory of the unconscious a slightly 
religious setting by emphasizing the fact that the unconscious 
has no sense of the passage of time and cannot conceive its 
own annihilation, he would have been hailed as the latest 
demonstrator of the immortality of the soul. A little personal 
press-agenting to the effect that he led a chaste life and was 
the father of a flourishing family would have completed the 
prescription. He would have gone over with a bang, though 
he probably would have been quite as amiably misunderstood 
as he is now viciously misunderstood. 

Freud, however, presented his case at its own value and, 
aside from informing an astonished American audience that 
Doctor Sanford Bell had preceded him in announcing the pre- 
adolescent sexuality of children, shouldered the responsibility 
for his theories. What he has said, carefully and repeatedly, 



NERVES 437 

is that ever since, for a long period in our development, the 
difficulties of satisfying the hunger impulse have been over- 
come in so far as civilized man has pretty well solved the prob- 
lem of nutrition; it is the sex impulse to which the individual 
has the greatest difficulty in adjusting himself. This difficulty 
increases rather than decreases with the advance of culture 
and at certain stages leads to the group of diseases known 
as the neuroses. In a normal sexual life there is no neurosis. 
But our civilization has in many ways become so perverse that 
we find something akin to an official preference for a neurosis 
rather than a normal sexual life, in spite of the fact that the 
neurosis ultimately will destroy civilization. This is the 
vicious circle which Freud attacked. In doing so he had first 
to enlarge the concept of sexuality and show its complex rela- 
tion to our whole culture. In studying civilization at its break- 
ing point he naturally had to study what was breaking it up, 
namely, the individual's maladjustment to his sexual impulses. 
But he has never attempted to sexualize the universe, as has 
been claimed, nor has he ever lost sight of the fact that while 
man as an egocentric being must put the self-regarding in- 
stincts first, man regarded as one of the processes of nature 
remains to be studied in terms of his reproductive instincts. 
Freud has been persistently oversexualized both by his ad- 
mirers and his opponents, and the degree to which this has 
been done in America is at least some indication of how close 
he has come home to conditions here. 

Freudian research in this country has been limited almost 
entirely to cases. Our physicians who practise psychoanalysis 
have lacked either the leisure or the culture to apply their 
science to wider cultural questions to which the Freudian 
psychology applies, and among the lay scholars using the 
psychoanalytic technique there has been no outstanding figure 
like that of Otto Rank who has done such notable work in 
Vienna. But the study of specific cases of hysteria and 
neurosis as they occur in America already permit of some 
general conclusions as to the character of the national matrix 
from which they spring. One of the most striking features 
of our emotional life is the exaggerated mother-love so fre- 
quently displayed by Americans. The average American, 



438 CIVILIZATION 

whether drunk or sober, can grow maudlin about his mother's 
perfections and his devotion to her in a way that must shock 
the European observer. Not that the European loves his 
mother less: it is simply that he is more reticent about ex- 
pressing an emotion which he feels has a certain private sanc- 
tity; he would experience a decided constraint or aiScps in 
boasting about it, just as a woman of breeding would not 
parade her virtue. The American adult knows no such re- 
straint; he will " tell the world " how much he loves his 
mother, will sing sentimental songs about her and cheerfully 
subscribe to the advice to " choose a girl like your mother 
if you want to be happily married," and then grows violent 
when the incest-complex is mentioned. This excessive mother 
worship has reached almost cultic proportions. It is reflected 
in our fiction, in our motion-pictures, in the inferior position 
of the American husband, and in such purely matriarchal reli- 
gions as Christian Science where a form of healing is prac- 
tised which is not very far removed from a mother's consolation 
to her boy when he has bruised his knees. All this points to 
a persistent sexual infantilism and an incomplete sublimation, 
which are such fertile breeders of hysteria. One is involun- 
tarily reminded of Doctor Beard's rather enigmatic statement 
that the extraordinary beauty of our women is one of the 
causes of nervousness in America. In so far as they offer a 
maximum of enticement with a minimum of conjugal satisfac- 
tion the charge is certainly justified. It is as if they did not 
even know their own business in terms of their sexual func- 
tion of weaning their husbands from their mothers and thus 
completing the necessary exogamic process. We thus have the 
condition where the husband, in further seeking to overcome 
his incest-complex, becomes everything in his business and 
nothing in his home, with an ultimate neurotic breakdown or 
a belated plunge into promiscuity. The wife, on her part, 
either becomes hysterical or falls a victim to religious or re- 
formatory charlatanism. 

The study of compulsion-neuroses and allied paranoid states 
which are so prevalent among us has given us further insights 
into the neurotic character of the American temperament. 
One of the most valuable of these is the recognition of the 



NERVES 439 

compulsive nature of so much of our thinking. This has also 
been well observed by a foreign critic like Santayana who says 
of America, " Though it calls itself the land of freedom, it is 
really the land of compulsions, and one of the greatest com- 
pulsions is that we must think and feel alike." This is a 
rather fatal indictment of our boasted individualism, which is, 
as a matter of fact, an individualism born of fear and distrust 
such as already marked our early pioneers. We are indeed 
ultra-conformists, and our fear of other-mindedness amounts 
almost to a phobia. But such an atmosphere constitutes a 
paradise for the compulsion-neurotic because he finds it easy 
to impose his compulsions upon the rest of society. The fact 
that compulsion-neurotics are constantly indulging in neo- 
religious formations through which they are enabled tempo- 
rarily to accommodate their taboos and phobias in religious 
ceremonials, enables them to make use of the general religious 
sanctions of society in order to impose their compulsions upon 
their fellow-beings. 

Herein probably lies a better explanation of American intol- 
erance than in the indictment of Puritanism which furnishes 
such a favourite invective for our iconoclasts. Puritanism 
has become a literary catchword and by no means covers 
the case. For it must be remembered that we are dealing with 
offshoots of deteriorated religions which spring from a very 
wide range of individuals. Religion, having been cut off from 
direct interference with the State, and having gradually lost 
its primitive anthropomorphism which really was one of its 
sources of strength, proceeded to project itself more and more 
outwardly upon social questions. As the personality of God 
grew dim the figure of the Devil also lost its vividness and 
the problem between good and evil could not longer be fought 
out entirely in the individual's own bosom; he was no longer 
tempted by the figure of the Devil appearing to him in person. 
Christian religion in its prime saw very clearly that the soul 
must put its own salvation to the fore, and constantly used 
many apt similes, such as the beam in our own eye, to remind 
us that while our neighbour might also have his hands full in 
fighting the Devil, he probably was capable of taking care of 
himself. Our modern reformer has no use for any such simile; 



440 CIVILIZATION 

he would have to go out of business if he could not keep pick- 
ing at the mote in his neighbour's eye. He finds the equivalent 
of the Devil in our social vices, in alcohol, in tobacco, in tea 
and coffee, in practically all forms of amusements. He 
preaches a crusade which no longer has an ideal object, and 
enlists a vague religious emotion which is inaccessible to reason 
and mocks intellectual criticism. The device of using reli- 
gious associations as carriers of propaganda has often been 
used for political purposes with consummate skill. Bryan's 
famous Cross of Gold speech and Roosevelt's Armageddon 
appeal are excellent examples of it. 

The question has often arisen why the fanatical reformer 
is so omnipotent in America. Why does he succeed so well 
in imposing his compulsions upon others? Why are we so 
defenceless against his blackmail? Why, in plain language, 
do we stand for him? Foreign observers have frequently 
commented upon the enormous docility of the American pub- 
lic. And it is all the more curious because ordinarily the aver- 
age American prides himself upon his assertiveness and his 
quickness in detecting false pretensions. Yet it is a common 
occurrence to meet people with valid claims to hard-headedness 
who nevertheless submit to every form of compulsion. They 
do not believe in prohibition but vote for it, they smoke but 
think smoking ought to be stopped, they admit the fanatical 
nature of reform movements and yet continue their subscrip- 
tions. 

In giving what can at best be only a partial answer to this 
national enigma, we may briefly consider two types which pro- 
foundly contribute to our atmosphere of compulsion: our im- 
migrant and our native aristocrat. The first, from the very 
nature of the case, becomes the victim of compulsion, while 
the second imposes the compulsion and then in turn, however 
unwillingly, succumbs to it himself. Our society, with its 
kaleidoscopic changes of fortune and its unchannelled social 
distinctions, presents a problem of adjustment with which even 
those who are at home in America find it difficult to cope. 
People on the make, people who are not sure of themselves 
on a new social ladder, are likely to conform: we find an aston- 
ishing amount of social imitation, in its milder and more 



NERVES 441 

ludicrous form, in all our pioneer communities. The immi- 
grant faces the same problem to an intensified degree. He 
comes to us in an uprooted state of mind, with many of his 
emotional allegiances still lingering in his native country, and 
often with an entirely alien tradition. His mind is set to con- 
form, to obey at first without much asking. He is like a 
traveller arriving in a strange town who follows the new traffic 
directions even though he does not understand their purpose. 
But even with the best of will he cannot entirely conform. 
He finds himself in a new world where what formerly seemed 
right to him is now considered wrong, his household gods have 
lost their power, his conscience is no longer an infallible guide. 
It is a sign of character in him to resist, to refuse to sink his 
individuality entirely, to struggle somewhat against the demo- 
cratic degradation which threatens to engulf him too suddenly. 
But his struggle leads to a neurotic conflict which is often not 
resolved until the third generation. It is thus quite permis- 
sible to talk of an immigrant's neurosis, which has considerable 
sociological importance even though it does not present an 
integral clinical picture. It leads either to the formation of 
large segments of undigested foreigners in American society 
who sullenly accept the forms we impose upon them while 
remaining comparatively inarticulate in our cultural and po- 
litical life, or else it produces a type of whom our melting-pot 
romanticists are foolishly proud, the pseudo-American who 
has sunk from individualism to the level of the mob, where he 
conforms to excess in order to cover his antecedents and be- 
comes intolerant in order that he may be tolerated. 

Ordinarily, the mob tyranny which has become such an 
alarming feature of our public life would be checked by the 
aristocratic element in society. It is part of the aristocratic 
function to foster cultural tolerance and to resist herd sug- 
gestion : the aristocratic or dominant t5rpe, in enjoying the most 
privileges, is normally least subject to compulsions and taboos. 
With us that is not the case. The Southerner, for instance, 
our most traditional aristocrat, finds himself paralyzed by the 
consciousness of a black shadow behind him who constantly 
threatens both his political and his sexual superiority. He 
moves in an atmosphere of taboos from which he himself 



442 CIVILIZATION 

cannot escape, for it is an established fact that interdiction 
in one line of thought has a crippling effect upon a man's 
intellectual activity as a whole. Elsewhere our native aristo- 
crat frequently finds himself in the position of a lonely outpost 
of a thin Anglo-Saxon tradition which he must defend against 
the constant onslaughts of alien civilizations, in the desperate 
attempt to uphold the fiction that spiritually, at least, we are 
still an English colony. He is in a state of tension where he 
himself cannot move with any of the freedom which he vaunts 
as one of the outstanding characteristics of the country of his 
fathers. In his hands his own latest hope, our war-born 
Americanization programme, which should really be an initia- 
tion into freedom, has quickly become little more than a forced 
observance of sterile rites with which to impress the alien. 
He already sees its failure, and, like a general who is afraid of 
his own army, he does not sleep very well. 

Alfred B. Kuttner 



MEDICINE 

FROM time immemorial the doctor has been the object of 
respect and awe by the generahty of mankind. It is true 
that he has occasianally been made the butt of the satirical 
humour of such dramatists as Moliere and Shaw, but the 
majority of people have regarded these jests as amiable buf- 
fooneries, and not as penetrating criticisms. In ancient days 
the veneration of the medico was based upon his supposed 
association with gods and devils^ and upon the belief that he 
could cure disease by wheedling propitiation of deus, or by 
the exorcism of diabolus. In modern times he holds sway by 
his supposed possession of the secrets of science. 

In spite of his pretension to scientific attainment, many 
vestiges of his former priesthood remain, and this melange of 
scientist and priest has produced curious contradictions and 
absurdities. But these absurdities must by an inexorable law 
remain concealed from all save a few, and the general failure 
to recognize them has led to a great increase in the impor- 
tance and prosperity of the medical cult. In America, of all 
civilized nations, medical magnificence has reached its most 
formidable proportions. This exaggeration, characteristic of 
all social phenomena in the new world, makes the real impor- 
tance of the doctor to society easy to inspect and to analyze. 

A friend not long ago asked me to explain the co-existence, 
in the same city, of the elaborate installation of the Harvard 
Medical School and the magnificent temple of the religion 
of Mrs. Eddy. " What is it in our culture," said he, " that 
permits the symbol of such obvious quackery as that of Mrs. 
Eddy to flourish within a stone's throw of such an embodiment 
of scientific enlightenment as the medical college? " 

I replied that the reason for this must be sought in the gulli- 
bility of our citizens, who are capable of entertaining most in- 
compatible and contradictory credos. Thus, the average 
American can believe firmly and simultaneously in the thera- 

443 



444 CIVILIZATION 

peutic excellence of yeast, the salubrious cathartic effects of 
a famous mineral oil, the healing powers of chiropractors, 
and in the merits of the regimen of the Corrective Eating 
Society. His catholicity of belief permits him to consider 
such palpable frauds seriously, and at the same time to admire 
and respect authentic medical education and even the scien- 
tific study of disease. But the teachers, students, and alumni 
of medical colleges are drawn from our excessively credulous 
populace. So it is dangerous to consider the votaries of the 
profession of medicine as sceptical and open-minded savants, 
in contrast to the promulgators of the afore-mentioned imbe- 
cilities and to Homo sapiens americanus, who is the uncon- 
scious victim of such charlatanry. In reality the great ma- 
jority of the medical profession is credulous and must always 
remain so, even in matters of health and disease. 

The tendency to consider physicians in general as men of 
science is fostered by the doctors themselves. Even the most 
eminent among them are guilty in this respect. Thus the 
Director of the Hospital of the Rockefeller Institute maintains 
that medicine must be considered not as an applied science 
but as an independent science (R. Cole, Science, N. S., Vol. LI, 
p. 329). And an eminent ex-President of the American Medi- 
cal Association holds a similar view, at the same time pre- 
posterously asserting that " medicine has done more for the 
growth of science than any other profession, and that its best 
representatives have been among the leaders in the advance- 
ment of knowledge. . . ." (V. C. Vaughan, Journal, A. M. A., 
1914, Vol. LXII, p. 2003.) 

Such pronunciamentoes rest upon the almost universal con- 
fusion of the art of the practice of medicine with the science 
of the study ot disease. Science, in its modern definition, 
is concerned with the quantitative relationship of the factors 
governing natural phenomena. No favourites are to be played 
among these factors. They are to be weighed and measured 
meticulously and coldly, without enthusiasm for one, or dis- 
dain and enmity toward another. Now, in the case of rela- 
tionship of doctor to patient, it is clear that such emotions must 
enter. The physician must entertain enthusiasm for the de- 
fensive powers of his patient, John Smith, and at the same 



MEDICINE 445 

time hate virulently the pneumococcus that attacks him. This 
emotional state of the soldier of health prevents the employ- 
ment of what is known in the language of the laboratory as 
the '^ control." For example, a doctor wishes to test the 
efficacy of a serum against pneumonia. In America it is 
practically unknown for him to divide his cases of pneumonia 
into two groups of equal size, to administer his serum to group 
A and to leave group B untreated. He almost invariably has 
a parti-pris that the serum will work, and he reflects with hor- 
ror that if he holds his remedy from group B, some members 
of this group will die, who might otherwise have been saved. 
So he injects his serum into all of his patients (A and B), and 
if the mortality in the entire group appears to him to be lower 
by statistics than that observed in previous series of cases, 
he concludes that the value of his nostrum is proved. This 
is an illustration of the fallacy of the notion that medicine is 
a science in the modern sense. 

Modern study of disease, conducted in the laboratory upon 
experimental animals, has furnished medical practitioners with 
a few therapeutic and prophylactic weapons. In the use of 
these the American medico has not lagged behind his Euro- 
pean colleague. But the great majority of the malaises that 
plague us are not amenable to cure, and it is with these that 
the doctor has since the beginning of time played his most 
important role, i.e., that of a " professional sympathizer." The 
encouraging conversation with the family of the sufferer; the 
mumbhng of recondite Latin phrases; the reassuring hopeful 
hand on the patient's shoulder; the grave use of complicated 
gimcracks; the prescription of ineffective but also innocuous 
drugs or of water tinted to pleasing hues; all these are of 
incalculable value to the menage stricken by disease. It is 
my lamentable duty to point out the danger of the decline of 
this essential role among the doctors of America. The general 
practitioner of the ancien regime was sincere in his perform- 
ance of his quasi-religious function. He was unsparing of 
his energies, stern in his devotion to duty, deeply altruistic 
in sentiment, and charmingly negligent in economic matters. 

But at the present time this adorable figure is disappearing 
from the land, to be replaced by another, more sinister type, 



446 CIVILIZATION 

actually less learned in the important folklore of the bedside, 
pseudo-scientific, given to rigidly defined office hours, and pain- 
fully exact in the extortion of his emolument. What are the 
factors that give rise* to the appearance of this new figure on 
the American scene? The most important of these is to be 
found in the high development of the craft of surgery in the 
United States. Of all the dread afflictions that plague us, a 
few may be cured or ameliorated by the administration of 
remedies, and an equally small number improved or abolished 
by surgical interference. But in spite of the relatively few 
diseases to which surgery is beneficial, the number of surgeons 
that flourish in the land is enormous. The fundamental dis- 
coveries of Pasteur and their brilliant application by Lister 
were quickly seized upon in America. The names of Bull, 
Halstead, Murphy, the brothers Mayo, Gushing, and Finney 
are to be ranked with those of the best surgeons of any nation. 
In fact, we may be said to lead the world — to use an apt 
Americanism — in the production of surgeons, just as we do in 
that of automobiles, baby carriages, and antique furniture. 

The success of these protagonists in the higher carpentry 
at once attracted a horde of smaller fry, imitators, m.en of infe- 
rior ability. The rapid advances made by the leaders resulted 
in the development of a diversified and complicated technic, 
which the ordinary surgeon was able to master in sections 
but not in toto. From this, specialization in surgery has devel- 
oped rapidly and naturally, so that now certain men devote, 
their lives exclusively to the enthusiastic and indiscriminate 
removal of tonsils, others are death on gall bladders, some the 
foes of the vermiform appendix, and yet others practise ex- 
clusively the radical cure of phimosis. It is obvious that such 
narrow specialization, practised in isolation, would lead to 
most amusing results, which may best be left to the imagina- 
tion. But these absurdities were finally apparent even to the 
surgeons themselves, with the resulting development of what 
is now known as " group medicine." 

In brief, surgeons with special penchants for the removal of 
various organs, form partnerships, calling to their aid the in- 
ternist for the diagnosis of their prospective victims. The 
internist gathers about him, in turn, a group of less important 



MEDICINE 447 

fry, known as radiographers, bacteriologists, pathologists, and 
serologists. Frequently a dentist is added to the coterie. The 
entire organization is welded into a business partnership of 
typically American efficiency. These groups are forming over 
the entire nation, are appearing even in the tank-towns of 
the hinterland. They occupy elegant suites in important 
office buildings, their members are generally considered the 
arbiters of the medical opinion of the community. Their more 
or less intelligent use of the paraphernalia of pathology, bac- 
teriology, et cetera, gives them an enormous advantage over 
their more humble brother, the general practitioner. This 
last, indeed, is being rapidly routed in his battle with such 
associations of " best minds," equipped with the armamen- 
tarium of modern science. 

The remuneration required by the " super-docs " of group 
medicine is naturally far in excess of that demanded by the 
general practitioner. It is right that this should be so, if not 
for the results obtained, then by reason of the elaborate or- 
ganization and expensive equipment that the group system 
demands. This increase in reward has made the profession 
of medicine in America what it never was before, a paying 
proposition — again to use an apt Americanism. The result 
of this entry of crass materialism into a previously free-and- 
easy, altruistic, anything but business-like profession is, once 
more, better left to the imagination than described. The 
brigandage of many of these medical banditti is too painful 
even to think about. It will be apparent that relatively few 
of our citizens are able to pay for group medicine. So, it is 
interesting to observe that the best in medical treatment and 
advice is accessible only to the highest and lowest castes of 
our plutocracy. The rich receive this at the elegant offices 
and private hospitals of the groups, the miserably poor at the 
teaching hospitals of medical colleges. 

The service of the " super-doc " to such of our citizens as 
can afford him cannot at this time be properly estimated. It 
is true that he is progressive, that he leans heavily upon the 
subsidiary sciences of pathology, et cetera, that he publishes 
papers in medical periodicals, that he visits medical libraries, 
frequents medical congresses. It has just been insisted that 



448 CIVILIZATION 

the doctor has benefitted himself to a great extent economically 
by forming the group; it is for the future to divulge whether 
his ministrations have resulted in a perceptible reduction of 
human suffering or in a prolongation of human life. Cer- 
tainly he has perpetrated some astounding hoaxes, the kind- 
hearted will say unwittingly. Probably the most interesting 
of these is to be observed in the focal infection mania just 
now subsiding. 

Focal infection came into prominence as the theory, so 
called, of a group of eminent physicians in Chicago. It is, in 
brief, the doctrine that many of our aches and pains whose 
direct etiology it is impossible to demonstrate are due to the 
presence in the body of foci of harmful microbes, at the roots 
of the teeth, in the tonsils, accessory sinuses, or the appendix. 
Discover the focus, remove it, and presto! — the ache disap- 
pears like the card up the sleeve of the expert American poker 
player. The advantages of this theory to the various special- 
ists of a group will be obvious. To illustrate. Henry Doo- 
little is plagued by a persistent and annoying pain over his 
left shoulder-blade. He goes to the office of a group of 
" super-docs," is referred to the diagnostician, who makes a 
careful record of his status prccsens, then orders his satellites 
to perform the Wassermann reaction, make the luetin test, do 
differential blood counts, perform the determination of his 
blood urea, and carry out a thorough chemical study of his 
basal metabolism. If the results of these tests show no de- 
parture from the normal, or if they seriously contradict each 
other, the cause of the pain is probably focal infection. The 
patient is then subjected to examination by X-ray, his teeth 
are pulled by the dentist, his tonsils excised by the otolaryn- 
golist, who also takes a swipe, in passing^ at his accessory 
sinuses, and should these mutilations fail to relieve him, his 
appendix is removed by the abdominal surgeon. If relief 
still fails to occur, the theory is not given up, but the focus is 
presumed to exist elsewhere. If Mr. Doolittle's patience is 
equal to the test, and if his purse is not by this time com- 
pletely empty, additional operations are advised. These con- 
tinue until all organs and appendages not actually necessary to 
mere existence have been removed. Henry then returns to 



MEDICINE 449 

his former mode of life, depleted and deformed, it is true, but 
occasionally minus his original pain. It is not the intention 
to deny that infected teeth and tonsils have no significance in 
pathology. But it is certain that their importance has been 
greatly exaggerated by many physicians. The question needs 
more investigation, with fewer preconceived ideas. The " sci- 
ence " underlying this astounding practice is admirably out- 
lined in the book of Billings called " Focal Infection." It 
is the most striking example of medical Ga-Ga-ism that has 
appeared in our country. It is, as its author himself admits, 
a triumph of the new idea of team-work and co-operative re- 
search in medicine. The factors giving rise to this lamentable 
Ga-Ga are the gullibility of patient and doctor, the emotional 
element entering into the interpretation of all of the phenomena 
observed by the physician, commercialism, and, finally, the 
self-limiting nature of most disease. 

So much for the Art of Healing as practised by the physi- 
cians of America. What of our activities in the second aim of 
medicine, that is, the prevention of disease? While super- 
ficial examination is enough to lay bare the many hollow pre- 
tensions of the practice of medicine, it would appear a priori 
that the work of disease prevention might at least approach 
the category of the applied sciences. This would seem to be 
so, since the greater part of this field must of necessity concern 
itself with infectious disease. Now the etiologic agents of the 
majority of infectious diseases are known. It is easy to see 
that the labour of their prevention rests upon an exact knowl- 
edge of the nature of the disease-producing microbes, the 
analysis of the delicate balance between the virulence of the 
microbic invader and the resistance of the human host, and, 
most important of all, upon the exact path by which the 
germ in question travels from one individual to another. 

In the early days of preventive medicine, following shortly 
upon the fundamental researches of Pasteur, several impor- 
tant contributions were made by Americans. These include 
the brilliant investigations of Theobald Smith on the etiology 
and mode of transmission of the Texas fever of cattle, and, 
later on, the differentiation of bovine and human tuberculosis. 
America had again reason to be proud when, in 1901, Reed, 



450 CIVILIZATION 

Carroll, Agramonte, and Lazear demonstrated that yellow 
fever was spread exclusively by the mosquito, Mdes calopus. 
These investigators showed a beautiful spirit of self-sacrifice 
and devotion to their science. The construction of the Pan- 
ama Canal was made possible by the application of these 
researches by Gorgas. Again, the American Russell was the 
first to show that vaccination against typhoid* and allied in- 
fections is feasible. In the New York Board of Health, Park, 
Krumwiede, and their associates have made careful and val- 
uable studies on the prevention of diphtheria. These consti- 
tute the high lights of American achievement in preventive 
medicine. It must be admitted that the majority of these 
examples are to be placed in the category of the science of the 
study of disease, rather than in that of its application — pre- 
ventive medicine. 

It is noticeable even by cursory survey of recent American 
work that such striking achievements have become distinctly 
fewer in recent years, despite an enormous increase in per- 
sonnel, equipment, and money devoted to the prevention of 
disease. Along with this decrease in solid contributions there 
has been an augmentation of fatuous propaganda and windy 
theory. All of the judicious must view this tendency with 
alarm and sadness, since it seemed for a time that science was 
really about to remove the vestigia of witchcraft and high- 
priesthood from this branch of medicine at least. 

What is the cause of this retrogression? It must be laid 
at the door of Religio Sanitatis, the Crusade of Health. This 
is one of the most striking examples of the delusion of most 
Americans that they are the Heaven-appointed uplifters of 
the human race. Just as all Baptists, Presbyterians, and 
Methodists deprecate the heathen happiness of the benighted 
Oriental, so the International Health Board seeks to mitigate 
his contented squalour and to eradicate his fatalistically bom 
disease. Just as Billy Sunday rages against John Barleycorn 
and the Dionysians who worship him, so the Great Hygienists 
seek to point out the multiform malaises arising from such 
worship. Just as the now extinct Wilson strove to show the 
world that it was horrid and wrong to fight, so the Public 
Health Service seeks to propagate the notion that chastity and 



MEDICINE 451 

adherence to marital vows are the sole alternatives to a uni- 
versal syphihzation. 

Thus we observe with horror the gradual replacement of 
those Nestors of preventive medicine who had tlie dispas- 
sionate view of science, and who applied its methods of cold 
analysis, by a group of dubious Messiahs who combine the 
zealous fanaticism of the missionary with the Jesuitical 
cynicism of the politician. For most of the organizations for 
the promotion of health are closely dependent upon state and 
municipal politics, and must become contaminated with the ob- 
scenity of political practice. Finally, it is apparent that the 
great privately endowed foundations are animated by the spirit 
of proselytism common to the majority of religions, but espe- 
cially to Baptists. It will be objected that such charges are 
vague generalizations. It is necessary, therefore, to bring 
forward one or two specific instances in support of these 
contentions. 

The soldiers of the recent successful campaign for national 
prohibition were supported by battalions of noted hygienists 
who made excellent practice with a heavy artillery of so-called 
scientific evidence upon the confused ranks of brewers, dis- 
tillers, and their customers, the American bibuli. What is 
the value of their " scientific evidence "? Two charges are 
made against the use of alcohol as a beverage. Primo, that 
its moderate or excessive use is the direct cause of various 
maladies. Secondo, that the children of alcoholic parents are 
often deformed, degenerates, or imbeciles, and that such lamen- 
table stigmata are the direct results of the imbibitions of their 
parents. 

Now it is vain to argue that alcohol, taken in great excess, 
is not injurious. Mania a potu (Korsakow's disease) is 
without doubt its direct result, at least in some instances. On 
the other hand, excessive indulgence in water is also not with- 
out its harmful effects, and I, for one, would predict evil 
days for our Great Commoner, should he so far lose control 
of himself as to imbibe a gallon of grape juice per diem. 
Many enthusiastic hygienists advance the opinion that alcohol 
is filling our insane asylums! This generalization is a gor- 
geous example of post hoc propter hoc reasoning, and is based 



452 CIVILIZATION 

upon the idiotic statistical research which forms so large a 
part of the activity of the minions of public health. The 
recent careful work of Clouston and others tends more and 
more to indicate that chronic alcoholics do not go crazy be- 
cause they drink, but become alcoholics because they already 
were crazy, or had the inherited tendency toward insanity. 
This embarrassing fact is carefully suppressed by the medico- 
hygienic heavy artillerists of the prohibition army. What is 
more, diseases with definite pathologic pictures, such as cirrhosis 
of the liver, have by no means been definitely proved to be 
caused by alcohol. Indeed, the researches of Friedenwald, 
who endeavoured to produce such effects by direct experiment, 
have led to negative results. 

The second indictment, i.e., that alcoholism in parents 
causes degenerate offspring, rests upon still more dubious sci- 
entific foundations. The most important animal experimen- 
tation in this field is that of Stockard, who used guinea-pigs 
as his subjects, and of Pearl, who had recourse to chickens. 
Both of these researches are sound in scientific method. Un- 
fortunately for hygienists, they lead to completely contradic- 
tory conclusions. Stockard and his collaborators found the 
offspring of alcoholic guinea-pigs to be fewer in number than 
those of his normal controls. What is more, the children of 
the alcoholics were frequently smaller, had a higher post-natal 
mortality, and were prone to suffer from epileptiform convul- 
sions. These results brought forth banzais from the hygienists 
and were extensively quoted, though their application by anal- 
ogy to the problems of human heredity is not to be made too 
hastily. 

Pearl, on the other hand, discovered that while the number 
of offspring from his inebriated chickens was distinctly fewer, 
yet these were unquestionably superior to normal chickens in 
eight of the twelve hereditary characters amenable to quanti- 
tative measurement. Now if one can generalize Stockard's re- 
sults to human beings, then it is equally permissible to do the 
same with Pearl's. Of the two, the latter generalization would 
be preferable, and of greater benefit to the human race, were 
the analogy valid. For who will not whoop for " fewer chil- 
dren, but better ones "? Do the votaries of preventive medi- 



MEDICINE 453 

cine place the results of Pearl along side of those of Stockard? 
Indeed, who even mentions Pearl's results at all? If satisfac- 
tory evidence is adduced that this has been done, I hereby 
promise to contribute one hundred dollars in cash toward the 
foundation of a home for inebriated prohibition agents. Again, 
while much is heard of the results of Bezzola in regard to the 
Rauschkinder resulting from the Swiss bacchanalia, the nega- 
tive findings of Ireland in similar investigations of the seasonal 
debauches of Scotland are carefully avoided. Once more, El- 
derton and Karl Pearson have failed utterly to find increase 
in the stigmata of degeneracy among the children of alcoholic 
parents as compared with those of non-alcoholics. This re- 
search, published in a monograph of the Francis Galton Labo- 
ratory of London, is the one really careful one that has been 
made in the case of human beings. It was directed by Pear- 
son, admittedly a master of biometrical science. Yet, turning 
to Rosenau's " Preventive Medicine and Hygiene," the bible of 
this branch, I find the Elderton-Pearson report relegated to a 
footnote in the edition of 19 13, and omitted completely from 
the IQ20 edition. 

A discussion of the fatuity to which American preventive 
medicine descends cannot be terminated without touching upon 
the current propaganda of the syphilophobes. For just as 
practitioners of medicine exploit human credulity, so the pre- 
venters of disease play upon the equally universal instinct of 
fear. There is no intention of minimizing the seriousness of 
syphilis. Along with cancer, pneumonia, and tuberculosis, it 
is one of the major afflictions of humanity. It causes thousands 
of deaths yearly; it leads to great misery. Paresis, one of the 
important psychoses, is definitely known to be one of its mani- 
festations. It is obvious, therefore, that its eradication is one 
of the major tasks of social hygiene. 

But by what means? Let one of the most noted of our 
American syphilophobes give the answer! This gentleman, a 
professor of pathology in one of the most important medical 
schools of the Middle West, yearly lectures over the length 
and breadth of the land on the venereal peril. He begins his 
expostulation with reduction of his audiences to a state of ter- 
ror by a lantern-slide display of the more loathsome manifes- 



454 CIVILIZATION 

tations of the disease. He does not state that modern treat- 
ment makes these more and more rare. He insists upon the 
utter impossibility of its cure, a fact by no means established. 
He advocates early marriage to a non-syphilitic maiden as the 
best means of prevention, and failing that, advises that chas- 
tity is both possible and salubrious. Then follows a master 
stroke of advice by innuendo — the current belief that mastur- 
bation causes insanity is probably untrue. Finally he denies 
the value of venereal prophylaxis, which was first experi- 
mentally demonstrated by Metchnikoff and Roux, and 
which the medical department of the Army and Navy know 
to be of almost perfect efficacy when applied early and 
thoroughly. 

Lack of space prevents the display of further examples of 
the new phenomenon of the entrance of religion and morals into 
medicine. It is not my intention for a moment to adopt a 
nihilistic attitude toward the achievement of preventive medi- 
cine. But it is necessary to point out that its contamination 
by moralism, Puritanism, proselytism, in brief, by religion, 
threatens to reduce it to absurdity, and to shake its authority 
in instances where its functions are of unmistakable value to 
our republic. At present the medical profession plays a minor 
role in the more important functions of this branch. These 
are performed in the first place by bacteriologists who need 
not be doctors at all, and in the second by sanitary engineers, 
whose splendid achievements in water supply and sewage dis- 
posal lead those of all other nations. 

It has been remarked above that one of the chief causes of 
the unscientific nature of medicine and the anti-scientific char- 
acter of doctors lies in their innate credulity and inability to 
think independently. This contention is supported by the re- 
port on the intelligence of physicians recently published by the 
National Research Council. They are found by more or less 
trustworthy psychologic tests to be the lowest in intelligence 
of all of the professional men excepting only dentists and 
horse doctors. Dentists and horse doctors are ten per cent. 
less intelligent. But since the quantitative methods employed 
certainly carry an experimental error of ten per cent, or even 
higher, it is not certain that the members of the two more 



MEDICINE 455 

humble professions have not equal or even greater intellectual 
ability. It is significant that engineers head the list in intelli- 
gence. 

In fact, they are rated sixty per cent, higher than doctors. 
This wide disparity leads to a temptation to interesting psy- 
chological probings. Is not the lamentable lack of intelligence 
of the doctor due to lack of necessity for rigid intellectual 
discipline? Many conditions conspire to make him an intel- 
lectual cheat. Fortunately for us, most diseases are self-limit- 
ing. But it is natural for the physician to turn this dispensa- 
tion of nature to his advantage and to intimate that he has 
cured John Smith, when actually nature has done the trick. 
On the contrary, should Smith die, the good doctor can as- 
sume a pious expression and suggest that, despite his own in- 
credible skill and tremendous effort, it was God's (or Nature's) 
will that John should pass beyond. Now the engineer is open 
to no such temptation. He builds a bridge or erects a build- 
ing, and disaster is sure to follow any mis-step in calculation 
or fault in construction. Should such a calamity occur, he is 
presently discredited and disappears from view. Thus he is 
held up to a high mark of intellectual rigour and discipline that 
is utterly unknown in the world the doctor inhabits. 

A survey of the present condition of American medical edu- 
cation offers little hope for a higher intellectual status of the 
medical profession or of any fundamental tendency to turn 
medicine as a whole from a melange of religious ritual, more 
or less accurate folk-lore, and commercial cunning, toward the 
rarer heights of the applied sciences. 

Such a reform depends absolutely upon the recognition that 
the bodies of all the fauna of the earth (including Homo 
sapiens) are essentially physico-chemical mechanisms; that 
disease is a derangement of one sort or another of this mech- 
anism; and that real progress in knowledge of disease can only 
come from quantitatively exact investigation of s'lch derange- 
ments. 

Up to the present, the number of professors in any branch 
of medicine who are aware of this fact is pitifully few. The 
men, who, being aware of it, have the training in physics and 
chemistry to put their convictions into practice are less in 



456 CIVILIZATION 

number. So, it is vain to hope that medical students are be- 
ing educated from this point of view. 

This casual glance at American medicine may be thought 
to be an unduly pessimistic one. It has not been my inten- 
tion to be pessimistic or to be impertinently critical. Indeed, 
turning from the art of the practice of medicine, and the re- 
ligion and folk-lore of sanitation, to the science of the study of 
disease, we have much of which to be proud. American bio- 
chemists of the type of Van Slyke and Folin are actually in the 
lead of their European brothers. Their precise quantitative 
methods furnish invaluable tools in the exact study of the ills 
that afflict us. 

Finally, the greatest figure of all, Jacques Loeb, working in 
an institution that declares its purpose to be the dubious one 
of medical research, has in the last three years published inves- 
tigations which throw a flood of light upon the dark problems of 
the chemistry of proteins. His work is of most fundamental 
significance, will have far-reaching results^ and is measurably 
in advance of that of any European in the same field. Loeb, 
like all men of the first rank, has no spirit of propaganda or 
proselytism. His exact quantitative experiments rob biology 
of much of its confused romantic glamour. The comprehen- 
sion of his researches demands thorough knowledge of phys- 
ical chemistry. However, it is encouraging to note that among 
a few younger investigators his point of view is being accepted 
with fervour and enthusiasm. But it is time to stop. We are 
straying from our subject which was, if I remember, Ameri- 
can medicine. 

Anonymous 



SPORT AND PLAY 

BARTLETT does not tell us who pulled the one about all 
work and no play, but it probably was the man who said 
that the longest way round was the shortest way home. There 
is as much sense in one remark as in the other. 

Give me an even start with George M, Cohan, who lives in 
Great Neck, where I also live, without his suspecting it — give 
us an even start in the Pennsylvania Station and route me on 
a Long Island train through Flushing and Bayside while he 
travels via San Francisco and Yokohama, and I shall under- 
take to beat him home, even in a blizzard. So much for " the 
longest way round." Now for the other. If it were your am- 
bition to spend an evening with a dull boy, whom would you 
choose, H. G. Wells, whose output indicates that he doesn't 
even take time off to sleep, or the man that closes his desk at 
two o'clock every afternoon and goes to the ball-game? 

You may argue that watching ball-games is not play. It is 
the American idea of play, which amounts to the same thing, 
and seventy-five per cent, of the three hundred thousand citi- 
zens who do it daily, in season, will tell you seriously that it 
is all the recreation they get; moreover, that deprived of it, 
their brain would crack under the strain of " business," that, 
on account of it, they are able to do more work in the fore- 
noon, and do it better, than would be possible in two or three 
full days of close sticking on the job. If you believe them, 
inveterate baseball fans can, in a single morning, dictate as 
many as four or five twenty-word letters to customers or sales- 
men, and finish as fresh as a daisy; whereas the non-fan, the 
grind, is logy and torpid by the time he reaches the second 
" In reply to same." 

But if you won't concede, in the face of the fans' own state- 
ment, that it is recreation to look on at baseball or any other 
sport, then let me ask you to invite to your home some even- 
ing, not a mere spectator, but an active participant in any of 
our popular games — say a champion or near-champion golfer, 

457 



458 CIVILIZATION 

or a first string pitcher on a big league baseball club. The 
golfer, let us say, sells insurance half the year and golfs the 
rest. The pitcher plays eight months of the year and loafs the 
other four. Bar conversation about their specialty, and you 
won't find two duller boys than those outside the motion-pic- 
ture studios. 

No, brothers, the bright minds of this or any other country 
are owned by the men who leave off work only to eat or go to 
bed. The doodles are the boys who divide their time fifty- 
fifty between work and play, or who play all the time and don't 
even pretend to work. Proper exercise undoubtedly promotes 
good health, but the theory that good health and an active 
brain are inseparable can be shot full of holes by the mention 
of two names — Stanislaus Zbyzsk and Robert Louis Stevenson. 

It is silly, then, to propound that sport is of mental benefit. 
Its true, basic function is the cultivation of bodily vigour, with 
a view to longevity. And longevity, despite the fact that we 
profess belief in a post-mortem existence that makes this one 
look sick, is a thing we poignantly desire. Bonehead and wise 
guy, believer and sceptic — all of us want to postpone as long 
as possible the promised joy-ride to the Great Beyond. If to 
participate in sport helps us to do that, then there is good 
reason to participate in sport. 

Well, how many " grown-ups " (normal human beings of 
twenty-two and under need not be considered; they get all 
the exercise they require, and then some) in this country, a 
country that boasts champions in nearly every branch of ath- 
letics, derive from play the physical benefit there is in it? 
What percentage take an active part in what the sporting edi- 
tors call " the five major sports " — baseball, football, boxing, 
horse racing, and golf? Let us take them one by one and figure 
it out, beginning with " the national pastime." 

Baseball. Twenty or twenty-one play. Three hundred to 
forty thousand look on. The latter are, for two hours, " out 
in the open air," and this, when the air is not so open as to give 
them pneumonia and when they don't catch something as bad 
or worse in the street-car or subway train that takes them 
and brings them back, is a physical benefit. Moreover, the 
habitual attendant at ball-games is not likely to die of brain 



SPORT AND PLAY 459 

fever. But otherwise, the only ones whose health is appre- 
ciably promoted are the twenty or twenty-one who play. And 
they are not doing it for their health. 

Football. Thirty play. Thirty thousand look on. One or 
two of the thirty may be killed or suffer a broken bone, but 
the general health of the other twenty-nine or twenty-eight is 
improved by the exercise. As for the thirty thousand, all they 
get is the open air — usually a little too much of it — and, un- 
less they are hardened to the present-day cheer-leader, a slight 
feeling of nausea. 

Boxing. Eight to ten play. Five thousand to sixty thousand 
look on. Those of the participants who are masters of de- 
fence may profit physically by the training, though the rigorous 
methods sometimes employed to make an unnatural weight 
are certainly inimical to health. The ones not expert in de- 
fensive boxing, the ones who succeed in the game through their 
ability to " take punishment " (a trait that usually goes with 
a low mentality) die, as a rule, before reaching old age, as a 
result of the " gameness " that made them " successful." 
There is a limit to the number of punches one can " take " 
and retain one's health. The five or sixty thousand cannot 
boast that they even get the air. All but a few of the shows 
are given indoors, in an atmosphere as fresh and clean as that 
of the Gopher Prairie day-coach. 

Horse Racing. Fifty horses and twenty-five jockeys play. 
Ten thousand people look on. I can't speak for the horses, but 
if a jockey wants to remain a jockey, he must, as a rule, eat a 
great deal less than his little stomach craves, and I don't know 
of any doctor who prescribes constant underfeeding as con- 
ducive to good health in a growing boy. 

Racing fans, of course, are out for financial, not physical, 
gain. They, like the jockeys, are likely to starve to death 
while still young. 

Golf. Here is a pastime in which the players far outnumber 
the lookers-on. It is a game, if it is a game, that not only 
takes you out in the open air, but makes you walk, and walk- 
ing, the doctors say, is all the exercise you need, if you walk 
five miles or more a day. Golf, then, is really beneficial, and 
it costs you about $25.00 a week the year round. 



46o CIVILIZATION 

So much for our " five major sports." We look on at four 
of them, and if we can support the family, and pay taxes and 
insurance, on $1250 a year less than we earn, we take part in 
the fifth. 

The minor sports, as the editor will tell you, are tennis, 
boating, polo, track athletics, trap-shooting, archery, hockey, 
soccer, and so on. Not to mention games like poker, bridge, 
bowling, billiards, and pool (now officially known as " pocket 
billiards " because the Ladies' Guild thought " pool " must 
have something to do with betting)^ which we may dismiss as 
being of doubtful physical benefit, since they are all played 
indoors and in a fog of Camel smoke. 

Of the outdoor " minors," tennis is unquestionably the most 
popular. And it is one whale of a game — if you can stand it. 
But Vv^hat percentage of grown-ups play it? I have no statis- 
tics at hand, and must guess. The number of adult persons 
with whom I am acquainted, intimately or casually, is possibly 
two thousand. I can think of ten who play as many as five 
sets of tennis a year. 

How many of the two thousand play polo or have ever 
played polo? One. How many are trap-shooters? Two. 
How many have boats? Six or seven. How many run foot- 
races or jump? None. How many are archers? None. How 
many play hockey, soccer, la crosse? None. 

If I felt like indulging in a game of cricket, which God for- 
bid, whom should I call up and invite to join me? 

Now, how many of my two thousand acquaintances are oc- 
casional or habitual spectators at baseball games, football 
games, boxing matches, or horse races? All but three or four. 
The people I know (I do not include ball-players, boxers, and 
wrestlers, who make their living from sport) are average 
people; they are the people you know. And the overwhelm- 
ing majority of them don't play. 

Why not? If regular participation in a more or less inter- 
esting outdoor game is going to lengthen our lives, why don't 
we participate? Is it because we haven't time? It takes just 
as much time to look on, and we do that. Is it because we 
can't afford it? We can play tennis for as little as it costs to 



SPORT AND PLAY 461 

go to the ball-game and infinitely less than it costs to go to 
the races. 

We don't play because (i) we lack imagination, and be- 
cause (2) we are a nation of hero-worshippers. 

When we were kids, the nurse and the minister taught us 
that, if we weren't good, our next stop would be hell. But, to 
us, there was no chance of the train's starting for seventy 
years. And we couldn't visualize an infernal excursion that 
far off. It was too vague to be scary. We kept right on swip- 
ing the old man's cigars and giggling in the choir. If they had 
said that misdemeanours such as those would spell death and 
eternal fire, not when we were old, but to-morrow, most of 
us would have respected father's property rights and sat 
through the service with a sour pan. If the family doctor were 
to tell us now that unless we got outdoors and exercised every 
afternoon this week, we should'die next Tuesday before lunch, 
you can bet we should get outdoors and exercise every afternoon 
this week. But when he tells us that, without healthful out- 
door sport, we shall die in 1945 instead of 1949, why, it doesn't 
mean anything. It's a chimera, a myth, like the next war. 

But hero-worship is the national disease that does most to 
keep the grandstands full and the playgrounds empty. To 
hell with those four extra years of life, if they are going to cut 
in on our afternoon at the Polo Grounds, where, in blissful 
asininity, we may feast our eyes on the swarthy Champion of 
Swat, shouting now and then in an excess of anile idolatry, 
"Come on, you Babe. Come on, you Baby Doll! " And if 
an hour of tennis is going to make us late at the Garden, per- 
haps keep us out of our ringside seats, so close to Dempsey's 
corner that (O bounteous God!) a drop of the divine perspira- 
tion may splash our undeserving snout — Hang up, liver! 
You're on a busy wire! 

Ring W. Lardner 



HUMOUR 

WITH the aid of a competent bibliographer for about five 
days I believe I could supply the proof to any unreflect- 
ing person in need of it that there is no such thing as an 
American gift of humorous expression, that the sense of 
humour does not exist among our upper classes, especially our 
upper literary class, that in many respects almost every other 
civilized country in the world has more of it, that quiet New 
England humour is exceedingly loud and does not belong to 
New England, that British incomprehension of our jokes is as 
a rule commendable, the sense of humour generally beginning 
where our jokes leave off. And while you can prove anything 
about a race or about all races with the aid of a bibliographer 
for five days, as contemporary sociologists are now showing, I 
believe these things are true. Belief in American humour is 
a superstition that seldom outlasts youth in persons who have 
been exposed to American practice, and hardly ever if they 
know anything of the practice elsewhere. Of course I am not 
speaking of the sad formalism of the usual thing as we see it 
in newspapers and on movie screens or of the ritual of maga- 
zines wholly or in part sanctified to our solemn god of fun. I 
mean the best of it. 

In the books and passages collated by my bibliographer the 
American gift of humour would be distributed over areas of 
time so vast and among peoples so numerous, remote, or savage, 
that no American would have the heart to press his claim. 
The quaintness, dryness, ultra-solemnity with or without the 
wink, exaggeration, surprise, contrast, assumption of common 
misunderstanding, hyperbolical innocence, quiet chuckle, up- 
setting of dignity, eclat of spontaneity with appeals to the ever- 
lasting, dislocation of elegance or familiarity, imperturbability, 
and twinkle — whatever the qualities may be as enumerated by 
the bacteriologists who alone have ever written on the subject, 

463 



464, CIVILIZATION 

the most American of them would be shown in my bibliogra- 
pher's report to be to a far greater degree un-American. Pa- 
triotic exultation in their ownership is like patriotic exultation 
in the possession of the parts of speech. Humour is no more 
altered by local reference than grammar is altered by being 
spoken through the nose. And if the bibliography is an ideal 
one it will not only present American humour at all times and 
places but will produce almost verbatim long passages of 
American humorous text dated at any time and place, and will 
show how by a few simple changes in local terms they may be 
made wholly verbatim and American. It will show that Amer- 
ican humorous writing did in fact begin everywhere but only 
at certain periods was permitted to continue and that these 
periods were by no means the happiest in history. I have time 
to mention here only the laborious section that it will prob- 
ably devote to Mark Twain in the Age of Pericles, though for 
the more active reader the one on Mr. Cobb, Mr. Butler, and 
others around the walls of Troy might be of greater contem- 
porary interest. 

Mark Twain, according to the citations in this section^ would 
seem actually to have begun all of his longer stories, including 
" Pudd'nhead Wilson," and most of the shorter ones, essays, 
and other papers, at Athens or thereabouts during this period, 
but not to have finished a single one, not even the briefest of 
them. He started, gave a clear hint as to how the thing would 
naturally run, and then he stopped. The reason for this was 
that owing to the trained imagination of the people for whom 
he wrote, the beginning and the hint were sufficient, and from 
that point on they could amuse themselves along the line that 
Mark Twain indicated better than he would have amused 
them, had he continued. Mark Twain finally saw this and 
that is why he stopped, realizing that there was no need of his 
keeping the ball rolling when to their imaginative intelligence 
the ball would roll of itself. He did at first try to keep on, 
and being lively and observant and voluble even for a Greek 
he held large crowds on street-corners by the sheer repetition 
of a single gesture of the mind throughout long narratives of 
varied circumstance. In good society this was not tolerated 
even after supper, and there was never the slightest chance of 



HUMOUR 465 

publication. But the streets of Athens were full of the sup- 
pressed writings of Mark Twain. 

Every man of taste in Athens loved Mark Twain for the 
first push of his fancy but none could endure the unmitigated 
constancy of his pushing of it, and as Mark Twain went every- 
where and was most persistent, the compression of his narra- 
tive flow within the limits of the good breeding of the period 
was an embarrassing problem to hosts, unwilling to be down- 
right rude to him. Finally he was snubbed in public by his 
friends and a few of the more intimate explained to him after- 
wards the reason why. 

The gist of their explanation was evidently this: The hy- 
pothesis of the best society in town nowadays is that the pro- 
longation of a single posture of the mind is intolerable, no 
matter how variegated the substance in which the mind re- 
poses. That sort of thing belongs to an earlier day than ours, 
although, as you have found, it is still much relished in the 
streets. If all the slaves were writers; if readers bred like 
rabbits so that the pleasing of them assured great wealth; if 
the banausic element in our life should absorb all the rest of 
it and if, lost in the external labour process, with the mech- 
anism of it running in our minds, we turned only a sleepy eye 
to pleasure ; then we might need the single thought strung with 
adventures, passions, incidents and need only that — infinitudes 
of detail easily guessed but inexorably recounted; long lists of 
sentiments with human countenances doing this and that; 
physiological acts in millions of pages and unchanging phrase; 
volumes of imaginary events without a thought among them; 
invented public documents equalling the real; enormous anec- 
dotes; and all in a strange reiterated gesture, caught from ma- 
chines, disposing the mind to nod itself to sleep repeating the 
names of what it saw while awake. But the bedside writer for 
the men in bed is not desired at the present moment in our 
best society. 

All these things are now carried in ellipsis to the reader's 
head, if the reader's head desires them; they are implied in 
dots at ends of sentences. We guess long narratives merely 
from a comma; we do not write them out. In this space left 
free by us with deliberate aposiopesis, a literature of countless 



466 CIVILIZATION 

simplicities may some day arise. At present we do not feel the 
need of it. And in respect to humour the rule of the present 
day is this: never do for another what he can do for himself. 
A simple process of the fancy as in contrast, incongruity, exag- 
geration, impossibility, must be confined in public to one or 
two displays. Let us take the simplest of illustrations — a cow 
in the dining-room, for example — and proceed with it as simply 
as we can. If by a happy stroke of fancy a cow in the dining- 
room is made pleasing to the mind, never argue that the pleas- 
ure is doubled by the successive portrayal of two cows in two 
dining-rooms, assuming that the stroke of fancy remains the 
same. Realize rather that it diminishes, and that with the 
presentation of nine cows in nine dining-rooms it has changed 
to pain. Now if for cows in dining-rooms be substituted gods 
in tailor shops, tailors in the houses of gods, cobblers at 
king's courts, Thebans before masterpieces, one class against 
another, one age against another, and so on through incalcula- 
ble details, however bizarre, all in simple combination, all easily 
gathered, without a shift of thought or wider imagery, the fancy 
mechanistically placing the objects side by side, picked from 
the world as from a catalogue — even then the situation to our 
present thinking is not improved. 

" Distiktos," said they, playfully turning the name of the 
humourist into the argot of the street, " we find you charming 
just at the turn of the tide, but when the flood comes in, ne 
Dia! you are certainly de trop. And in your own private in- 
terest, Distiktos, unless you really want to lead a life totally 
anexetastic and forlorn, how can you go on in that manner? " 

Frank Moore Colby 



American Civilization from the Foreign Point of View 

I. ENGLISH 
II. IRISH 
III. ITALIAN 



I. AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT 

A LITTLE less than two years ago — on the 14 July, 1919, 
to be exact — it fell to my lot, as an officer attached to 
one of the many military missions in Paris, to " assist/' from 
a reserved seat in a balcony of the Hotel Astoria, at the defile, 
or triumphal entry of the Allied troops into Paris. 

The march a Berlin not having eventuated owing to the up- 
set in schedule brought about by the entry of dispassionate 
allies at the eleventh hour, it was felt that the French must 
be offered something in exchange, and this took the happy 
form of a sort of community march along the route once dese- 
crated by Prussian hoof-beats — a vast military corbeille of the 
allied contingents, with flags, drums, trumpets, and all the rest 
of the paraphernalia that had been kept in cold storage during 
four years of gas, shell, and barbed wire. Such a defile, it was 
calculated, would be something more than a frugal gratifica- 
tion to the French army and people. It would offer to the 
world at large, through the medium of a now unmuzzled press, 
a striking object lesson in allied good feeling and similarity of 
aims. 

My purpose in referring to the defile is merely to record one 
unrehearsed incident in it but I would say in passing that the 
affair, " for an affair," as the French say, was extraordinarily 
well stage-managed. A particularly happy thought was the 
marshalling of the allied contingents by alphabetical order. 
This not only obviated any international pique on what we 
all wanted to be France's day, but left the lead of the proces- 
sion where everybody, in the rapture of delivery, was well con- 
tent it should remain. Handled with a little tact, the alphabet 
had once more justified itself as an impartial guide: 
B is for Britain, Great. 
A is for America, United States of. 

For impressiveness I frankly and freely allot the palm to 
what it was the fashion then to term the American effort. Dif- 

469 



470 CIVILIZATION 

ferent contingents were impressive in different ways. The Re- 
publican Guard, jack-booted, with buckskin breeches, gleaming 
helmets, flowing crinieres, and sabres au clair, lent just the right 
subtle touch of the epopee of Austerlitz and Jena to make us 
feel 1 87 1 had been an evil dream; the Highlanders, the voice 
of the hydra squalling and clanging from their immemorial 
pipes, stirred all sorts of atavistic impulses and memories. 
Nevertheless, had I been present that day in Paris as a news- 
paper man instead of as the humblest and most obscure of sol- 
diers, neither one nor the other would have misled my jour- 
nalistic instinct. I should have put the lead of my " story " 
where alphabetical skill had put the lead of the procession — in 
the American infantry. 

In front the generalissimo, martial and urbane, on a bright 
coated horse that pranced, curvetted, " passaged " from side to 
side under a practised hand. At his back the band, its monster 
uncurved horns of brass blaring out the Broadway air before 
which " over there " the walls of pacifism had toppled into dust 
in a day. Behind them, platoon by platoon, the clean shaved, 
physically perfect fighting youth of the great republic. All six 
feet high — there was not one, it was whispered, but had earned 
his place in the contingent by a rigorous physical selection: 
moving with the alignment of pistons in some deadly machine — 
they had been drilled, we were told, intensively for a month 
back. In spotless khaki, varnished trench helmets, spick and 
span, scarcely touched by the withering breath of war. When- 
ever the procession was checked, platoon after platoon moved 
on to the regulation distance and marked time. When it 
resumed, they opened out link by link with the same almost 
inhuman precision, and resumed their portentous progress. 
How others saw them you shall hear, but to me they were 
no mere thousand fighting men; rather the head of a vast 
battering ram, the simple threat of which, aimed at the over- 
taxed heart of the German Empire, had ended war. A French 
planton of the Astoria staff, who had edged his way into the 
ticketed group was at my back. " Les voila qui les at- 
tendaient," he almost whispered. " Look what was waiting for 
them." 

The next balcony to mine had been reserved for the civil 



AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT 471 

employes of British missions, and here was gathered a little 
knot of average English men and women — stenographers, typ- 
ists, clerks, cogs of commercialism pressed into the mechan- 
ical work of post-war settlement. As the Americans moved on 
after one of the impressive checks of which I have just spoken, 
something caught my ears that made me turn my head quickly, 
even from a spectacle every lost moment of which I grudged. 
It was, of all sounds that come from the human heart, the 
lowest and the most ominous — the sound that makes the un- 
wary walker through tropical long grass look swiftly round his 
feet and take a firmer grasp on the stick he has been wise 
enough to carry. 

It is impossible — it is inconceivable — and it's true. On this 
great day of international congratulation, one of the two 
branches of the Anglo-Saxon race was hissing the other, 

I spoke about the matter later to a friend and former 
chief, whom I liked but whose position and character were no 
guarantee of tact or good judgment. I said I thought it rather 
an ominous incident, but he refused to be " rattled." With 
that British imperturbability which Americans have noted and 
filed on the card index of their impressions he dismissed the 
whole thing as of slight import. 

" Very natural, I dare say. Fine show all the same. Per- 
haps your friends on the other balcony thought they were 
slopping over in front." 

" ' Slopping over ...?'" 

" Well — going a little too far. Efficiency and all that. Bit 
out of step with the rest of the procession." 

I have often wondered since whether this homely phrase, ut- 
tered by a simple soldier man, did not come nearer to the root 
of the divergence between British and American character 
than all the mystifying and laborious estimates which nine out 
of ten of our great or near-great writers seem to think is due 
at a certain period in their popularity. 

To achieve discord, you see, it is not necessary that two in- 
struments should play different tunes. It is quite sufficient 
that the tempo of one should differ from the tempo of the other. 
All I want to indicate in the brief space which the scope of 



"472 CIVILIZATION 

this work leaves at my disposal are just a few of the conjunc- 
tures at which I think the beat of the national heart, here and 
across the Atlantic, is likely to find itself out of accord. 

Englishmen do not emigrate to the United States in any 
large numbers, and it is many years since their arrival con- 
tributed anything but an insignificant racial element to the 
" melting pot." They do not come partly because their own 
Colonies offer a superior attraction, and partly because British 
labour is now aware that the economic stress is fiercer in the 
larger country and the material rewards proportionately no 
greater. Those who still come, come as a rule prepared to take 
executive positions, or as specialists in their several lines. 
Their unwillingness to assume American citizenship is no- 
torious, and I think significant; but it is only within quite re- 
cent years that it has been made any ground of accusation — 
and among the class with which their activities bring them into 
closest contact it is, or was until a year or two ago, tacitly and 
tactfully ignored. During a review of the " foreign element " 
in Boston to which I was assigned two years before the war, I 
found business men of British birth not only reluctant to yield 
" copy " but resentful of the publicity to which the enterprise 
of my journal was subjecting them. 

There are many reasons why eminent English writers and 
publicists are of little value in arriving at an estimate of " how 
Americans strike an Englishman." While not asserting any- 
thing so crude as that commercial motives are felt as a restrain- 
ing force when the temptation arises to pass adverse judgment 
on the things they see and hear, it is evident that the condi- 
tions under which they come — men of achievement in their 
own country accredited to men of achievement here — keep 
them isolated from much that is restless, unstable, but vitally 
significant in American life. None of them, so far as I know, 
have had the courage or the enterprise to come to America, 
unheralded and anonymous, and to pay with a few months 
of economic struggle for an estimate that might have real 
value. 

To this lack of real contact between the masses in America 
and Great Britain is due the intrinsic falsity of the language 



AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT 473 

in which the racial bond is celebrated on the occasions when 
some political crisis calls for its reiteration. It is felt easier 
and safer to utter it in consecrated cliches — to refer to the 
specific gravity of blood and water, or the philological roots 
of the medium used by Milton and Arthur Brisbane. The 
banality, the insincerity, of the public utterances at the 
time that America's entry into the European struggle first 
loomed as a possible solution of the agony on the Western 
Front was almost unbelievable. Any one who cares to turn 
up the files of the great dailies between September, 191 6, and 
March, 191 8, may find them for himself. 

To a mind not clouded by the will to believe, this constant 
invocation of common aims, this perpetual tug at the bond to 
ensure that it has not parted overnight, would be strong corrob- 
oration of a suspicion that the two vessels were drifting apart, 
borne on currents that flow in different directions. It is not 
upon the after-dinner banalities of wealthy and class-conscious 
" pilgrims " nor the sonorous platitudes of discredited laggards 
on the political scene, still less is it upon the sporting proclivi- 
ties of titled hoydens and hawbucks to whom American 
sweat and dollars have arrived in a revivifying stream, that 
we shall have to rely should the cable really part and the two 
great vessels of State grope for one another on a dark and un- 
charted sea. It is upon the sheer and unassisted fact of how 
American and Englishman like or dislike one another. 

It is a truism almost too stale to restate that we are stand- 
ing to-day on the threshold of great changes. What is not so 
well realized is that many of these changes have already taken 
place. The passing of gold in shipment after shipment from 
the Eastern to the Western side of the Atlantic and the feverish 
hunt for new and untapped sources of exploitation are only the 
outward signs of a profound European impoverishment in 
which Britain for the first time in her history has been called 
upon to bear her full share. The strikes and lock-outs that 
have followed the peace in such rapid succession might pos- 
sibly be written off as inevitable sequela: of a great war. The 
feeble response to the call for production as a means of salva- 
tion, the general change in the English temper faced with its 
heavy task are far more vital and significant matters. They 



474 CIVILIZATION 

seem to mark a shift in moral values — a change in the faith 
by which nations, each in the sphere that character and cir- 
cumstance allot, wax and flourish. 

Confronted with inevitable competition by a nation more 
populous, more cohesive, and richer than itself, it seems to me 
that there are three courses which the older section of the 
English race may elect to follow. One is war, before the 
forces grow too disparate, and on the day that war is declared 
one phase of our civilization will end. It will really not matter 
much, to the world at large, who wins an Anglo-American 
world conflict. The second, which is being preached in and 
out of season by our politicians and publicists, who seldom, 
however, dare to speak their full thought, is a girding up of 
the national loins, a renewed consecration to the gospel of ef- 
fort, a curtailment, if necessary — though this is up to now 
only vaguely hinted — of political liberties bestowed in easier 
and less strenuous days. The third course may easily be 
guessed. It is a persistence in proclivities, always latent as I 
believe in the English temperament, but which have only re- 
vealed themselves openly since the great war, a clearer ques- 
tioning of values till now held as unimpeachable, a readier ear 
to the muttering and murmuring of the masses in Continental 
Europe, internationalism — revolution. No thoughtful man in 
England to-day denies the danger. Even references to that 
saving factor, the " common sense of the British workman," 
no longer allays the spectre of a problem the issues of which 
have only to be stated to stand forth in all their hopeless irre- 
concilability. Years ago, long before the shadow fell on the 
world, in a moment of depression or inspiration, I wrote that 
cravings were stirring in the human heart on the very eve of 
the day when the call would be to sacrifice. That is the riddle, 
nakedly stated, to which workers and rulers alike are asked 
to find an answer to-day. 

In this choice that lies before the British worker a great 
deal may depend upon how American experiments and Ameri- 
can achievements strike him. In England now there is no 
escaping from the big transatlantic sister. Politicians use her 
example as a justification; employers hold up her achieve- 
ments as a reproach. A British premier dare not face the 



AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT 475 

House of Commons on an " Irish night " unequipped with 
artful analogies culled from the history of^the war of secession. 
The number of bricks per hour America's bricklayers will lay 
or the tons of coal per week her stolid colliers will hew are 
the despair of the contractor face to face with the loafing and 
pleasure-loving native born. You will hear no more jokes 
to-day in high coalition places over her political machine re- 
placing regularly and without the litter and disorder of a gen- 
eral election tweedledum Democrat by a tweedledee Repub- 
lican. She is recognized — and this, I think, is the final value 
placed upon her by the entire ruling and possessing classes in 
my own country — as better equipped in her institutions, her 
character, and her population for the big economic struggle 
that is ahead of us. 

This is the secret of the unceasing court paid to Washing- 
ton by all countries, but pre-eminently by Britain. It is not 
fear of her power, nor hunger for her money bags and har- 
vests, nor desire to be " on" the band-wagon," as light-hearted 
cartoonists see it, that prompts the nervous susceptibility and 
the instantaneous response to anything that will offend those 
in high places on the banks of the Potomac. It is the sense, 
among all men with a strong interest in maintaining the pres- 
ent economic order, that the support in their own countries is 
crumbling under their hands, and that that fresh support, 
stronger and surer, is to be found in a new country with a 
simpler faith and a cleaner, or at any rate a shorter, record. 
To fight proletarianism with democracy is a method so obvious 
and safe that one only wonders its discovery had to wait upon 
to-day. Its salient characteristic is a newly aroused interest 
and enthusiasm in one country for the political forces that seem 
to make stability their watchword in the other. The coalition 
has become the hero of the New York Times and Tribune — 
the triumph of the Republican party was hailed almost as a 
national victory in the London Times and Birmingham Post. 
Intransigeance in foreign policies finds ready forgiveness in 
London; in return, a blind eye is turned to schemes of terri- 
torial aggrandisement at Washington. 

If a flaw is to be discerned in what at first sight seems a per- 
fectly adjusted instrument for international comity, it is that 



476 CIVILIZATION 

this new Anglo-American understanding seems to be founded 
on class rather than on national sympathy. Even offhand 
some inherent inconsistency would seem to be sensed from the 
fact that the appeal of the great republic comes most home, in 
the parent country, to the class that is least attached to demo- 
cratic forms and the most fearful of change. References to 
America arouse no enthusiasm at meetings of the labour ele- 
ment in England, and it is still felt unwise to expose the Union 
Jack to possible humiliation in parades on a large scale in New 
York or Chicago. A sympathy that flowers into rhetoric at 
commercial banquets or at meetings of the archaeologically in- 
clined may have its roots in the soundest political wisdom. 
But to infer from such demonstrations of class solidarity any 
national community of thought or aim is both unwarranted and 
unsafe. This much is evident, that should a class subversion, 
always possible in a country the political fluidity of which is 
great, leave the destinies of Great Britain in the hands of the 
class that is silent or hostile to-day when the name of America 
is mentioned, an entire re-statement of Anglo-American unity 
would become necessary, in terms palatable to the average 
Englishman. 

This average Englishman is a highly complicated being. 
Through the overlay which industrialism has imposed on him, 
he has preserved to quite an extraordinary extent the asperi- 
ties, the generosities, the occasional eccentricities of the days 
when he was a free man in a free land. No melting process 
has ever subdued the sharp bright hues of his individuality 
into the universal, all-pervading drab that is the result 
of blending primary colours. No man who has employed 
him to useful purpose has ever succeeded in reducing his per- 
sonality to the proportions of a number on a brass tag. The 
pirate and rover who looked upon Roman villadom and found 
it not good, the archer who brought the steel-clad hierarchy 
of France toppling from their blooded horses at Crecy and 
Agincourt, the churl who struck off the heads of lawyers in 
Westminster Palace yard survive in him. 

If I am stressing this kink in the British character it is be- 
cause one of its results has been to make the Englishman of 



AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT 477 

all men the least impressed by scale, and the one to whom ap- 
peals made on the size of an experiment or the vastness of a 
vision will evoke the least response, and especially because I 
think I perceive a tendency to approach him in the interests 
of Anglo-American unity precisely from the angle that will 
awake antagonism where co-operation is sought. The attach- 
ment of the Englishman to little things and to hidden things, 
which no one except Chesterton has had the insight to per- 
ceive, or at all events which Chesterton was the first to place in 
its full relation to his inconsistencies, explains his strangely 
detached attitude to that British Empire of which his country 
is the core. Its discovery as an entity calling for a special 
quality in thought and action dates no further back than that 
strange interlude in history, when the personality of Roose- 
velt and the vision of Kipling held the imagination of the world. 
This refusal to be impressed by greatness, whether his own 
or others', has its disadvantages, but at least it has one saving 
element. It leaves an Englishman quite capable of perceiving 
that it is possible for a thing to be grandiose in scale and mean 
in quality. It leaves intact his frank and childlike confidence 
that the little things of the world confound the strong; his 
implicit conviction that David will always floor Goliath, and 
that Jack's is the destined sword to smite off the giant's head. 
The grotesqueness of the Kaiser's upturned moustaches, 
the inadequacy of a mythical " William the Weed " to 
achieve results that would count, were his guiding lights 
to victory, the touchstones by which he tested in advance the 
vast machine that finally cracked and broke under its own 
weight. It was the " contemptible " little army of shopmen 
and colliers which seized his imagination and held his affec- 
tion throughout, not the efficient mechanical naval machine 
that put out once to sea in battle array and then, appalled by 
the risks inherent in its own monstrousness and complexity, 
spent the rest of the war in Scapa Flow. I recall the com- 
ments heard at the time of Jutland in the artillery camp where 
fate had thrown me. They served to confirm a dawning con- 
viction that the navy, while it still awes and impresses, lost 
its hold on the British heart the day wooden walls were ex- 
changed for iron and steel. It is perhaps the " silent service " 



478 CIVILIZATION 

to-day because its appeal awakes so little response. It has 
been specialized and magnified out of the average English- 
man's power to love it. 

In America the contrary seems the case. The American 
heart appears to go out to bulk, to scale, and to efficiency. The 
American has neither the time nor the temperament to test 
and weigh. His affections, even his loyalties, seem to be at 
the mercy of aspects that impose and impress. I know no 
other country where the word " big " is used so constantly as 
a token of affection. Every community has its " Big Tims," 
" Big Bills," " Big Jacks," great hearty fellows who gambol 
and spout on public occasions with the abandonment of a 
school of whales. Gargantuan " Babe Ruth," mountainous 
Jack Dempsey are the idols of its sport-loving crowds. 
" Mammoth in character," the qualification which on the lips 
of the late Mr. Morgan Richards stirred laughter throughout 
England, i^ to the American no inconsequential or slipshod 
phrase. He does perceive a character and justification in 
bigness. It was perhaps to this trait in his mental make-up 
that the puzzling shift of allegiance to the beginning 
of the great war was due. The scale and completeness of the 
German effort laid hold of his imagination to an extent that 
only those who spent the first few months of agonizing doubt 
in the West and the Middle West can appreciate. Something 
that was obscurely akin, something that transcended racial af- 
finities and antipathies, awoke in him at the steady ordered 
flow of the field-grey legions Westward, so adequately pictured 
for him by Richard Harding Davis. He is quite merciless to 
defeat. 

Nothing conceived on such a scale can indulge complexi- 
ties. Its ideals must be ample, rugged, and primitive, ade- 
quate to the vast task. Hence the velocity, the thoroughness, 
the apparent ruthlessness with which American enterprises are 
put through. It is the fashion among a certain school of 
thought to call America the country of inhibitions. But there 
is little inhibition to be perceived on that side of his tempera- 
ment, which the American has chosen to cultivate, leaving all 
else to those who find perverse attraction in weed and ruin. 
His language — and he is amazingly vocal — is as simple and 



AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT 479 

direct as his thought. The appeals and admonitions of his 
leaders reverberate from vast and resonant lungs. They are 
calculated rather to carry far than to penetrate deeply. They 
are statements and re-statements rather than arguments. If 
their verbiage often aims at and sometimes seems to attain 
the sublime, if the American leader is forever dedicating, con- 
secrating, inspiring something, the altitude is like the elevation 
given a shell in order that it may travel further. The nimble 
presentation of antithesis of a Lloyd George, the dagger-play 
of sarcasm of an Asquith, are conspicuously absent from the 
speeches of American leaders. There is something arrogant 
and ominous, like the clenching of a fist before the arm is 
raised, in this sonorous presentation of a faith already securely 
rooted in the hearts of all its hearers. 

This primitiveness and single-mindedness of the American 
seem to intensify as his historical origins recede further and 
further into the past. It is idle to speculate on what might 
have happened had the development of his country remained 
normal and homogeneous, as, up to the Civil War, it admit- 
tedly did. It is an even less grateful task to look back on the 
literature of the Transcendental period and register all that 
American thought seems to have lost since in subtlety and es- 
sential catholicity. What is really important is to realize that 
not only the language but the essence of Occidental civiliza- 
tion has called for simplification, for sacrifice, year by year. 
It is hard to see what other choice has lain before the Ameri- 
can, as wave after wave of immigration diluted his homo- 
geneity, than to put his concepts into terms easily understood 
and quickly grasped, with the philological economy of the trav- 
eller's pocket manual and the categorical precision of the drill 
book. If in the very nature of things, this evangel is oftener 
pointed with a threat than made palatable with the honey of 
reason and sympathy, the task and not the taskmaster is to 
blame. On no other country has ever been imposed similar 
drudgery on a similar scale. It is idle to talk about the spiritual 
contribution of the foreigner when his first duty is to cast 
that contribution into the discard. It is futile to appeal to his 
traditions where the barrier of language rears itself in a few 
years between parents who have never learnt the new 



48o CIVILIZATION 

tongue and children who are unable or ashamed to speak the 
old. 

But such a regime cannot endure for many years without a 
profound influence, not only on those to whom it is prescribed, 
but on those who administer it. The most heaven-born 
leader of men, put into a receiving depot to which monthly 
and fortnightly contingents of bemused recruits arrive, quickly 
deteriorates into something like a glorified and commissioned 
drill sergeant. The schoolmaster is notoriously a social failure 
in circles where intercourse must be held on the level to which 
the elevation of his estrade has dishabituated him. Exact 
values — visions, to use a word that misuse has made hateful — 
disappear under a multiplicity of minor tasks. It is one of the 
revenges taken by fate that those who must harass and drive 
become harassed and sterile in turn. 

No one yet, so far as I know, has sought to place this 
amazing simplification in its true relation to the aridity of 
American life, an aridity so marked that it creates a positive 
thirst for softer and milder civilizations, not only in the for- 
eigner who has tasted of them, but at a certain moment in their 
life in almost every one of the native born whose work lies 
outside the realm of material production. It is not that in Eng- 
land, as in every community, entire classes do not exist who seek 
material success by the limitation of interests and the retrench- 
ment of sympathies. But in so doing they sacrifice to a domes- 
tic, not a national God; they follow personal not racial pro- 
clivities. There is no conscious subscription to a national ideal 
in their abandonment of aesthetic impulses. Side by side with 
them live other men whose apparent contentment with inse- 
cure and unstable lives at once redresses their pride and cur- 
tails their influence. They are conscious of the existence 
around them of a whole alien world, the material returns from 
which are negligible but in which other men somehow manage 
to achieve a fullness of experience and maintain self-respect. 
This other world reacts not only on employer but on em- 
ployed. For the worker it abates the fervour and stress of his 
task, lends meaning and justification to his demand for leisure 
in the face of economic demands that threaten or deny. No one 
in England has yet dared to erect into an evangel the obvious 



AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT 481 

truth that poor men must work. No compulsion sets the 
mental attitude a man may choose when faced with his task. 
The speeder-up and the efficiency expert is hateful and alien. 
" A fair day's wage for a fair day's work " may seem a loose 
and questionable phrase, but its implications go very deep. 
It sets a boundary mark on the frontier between flesh and 
spirit by which encroachments are registered as they occur. 

In America no such frontier exists. Here the invasion 
seems to be complete. The spirit that would disentangle ma- 
terial from immaterial aims wanders baffled and perplexed 
through a maze of loftily conceived phrases and exhortations 
each one of which holds the promise of rescue from the drudg- 
ery of visionless life, yet each one of which leads back to an 
altar where production is enthroned as God. Manuals and 
primers, one had almost written psalters, pour out from the 
printing presses in which such words as " inspiration," " dedi- 
cation," " consecration " urge American youth not to the re- 
nunciation of material aims but to their intensive pursuit. 
This naive and simple creed is quite free of self-consciousness 
or h5^ocrisy. In its occasional abrupt transitions from the 
language of prayer to such conscience-searching questions as 
" Could you hold down a $100.00 a week job? " or " Would 
you hire yourself? " no lapse from the sublime to the ridicu- 
lous, far less to the squalid, is felt. It has the childlike grav- 
ity and reverence of all religions that are held in the heart. 

But its God is a jealous God. No faltering in his service, 
no divided allegiance is permitted. His rewards are concrete 
and his punishments can be overwhelming. For open rebel- 
lion, outlawry; for secret revolt, contempt and misunderstand- 
ing are his inevitable visitations. For this reason those who 
escape into heresy not unfrequently lose their integrity and are 
gibbeted or pilloried for the edification of the faithful. The 
man who will not serve because the service starves and stunts 
his soul is all too likely to find himself dependent for com- 
pany upon the man who will not serve because his will is too 
weak or his habits too dissipated. 

That this service is a hard one, its most ardent advocates 
make no attempt to conceal. Its very stringency is made the 
text of appeals for ever and ever fresh efficiency, intensive 



482 CIVILIZATION 

training, specialization. " The pace they must travel is so 
swift," one advocate of strenuousness warns his disciples, 
" competition has become so fierce that brains and vision are 
not enough. One must have the punch to put things through." 
The impression grows that the American business man, new 
style, is a sombre gladiator, equipped for his struggle by rigor- 
ous physical and mental discipline. The impression is helped 
by a host of axioms, plain and pictured, that feature a sort of 
new cant of virility. " Red-blooded men," " Two-fisted men," 
" Men who do things," " Get-there fellows," are a few head- 
liners in this gospel of push and shove. 

The service is made still more difficult by its uncertainty, 
since no gospel of efficiency can greatly change the proportion 
of rewards, though it can make the contest harder and the 
marking higher. Year in year out, while competition intensifies 
and resources are fenced off, insecurity of employment remains, 
an evil tradition from days when opportunity was really bound- 
less and competition could be escaped by a move of a few score 
miles Westward. Continuity in one employment still remains 
the exception rather than the rule, and when death or retire- 
ment reveals an instance it is still thought worthy of space in 
local journals. " Can you use me? " remains the customary 
gambit for the seeker after emplo5mient. The contempt of a 
settled prospect, of routine work, the conception of business as 
something to work up rather than to work at is still latent in 
the imagination of atavistic and ambitious young America. Of 
late years this restlessness, even though in so worthy a cause 
as " getting on," has been felt as a hindrance to full efficiency, 
and the happy idea has been conceived of applying the adven- 
turous element of competition at home. Territorial or depart- 
mental spheres are allotted within or without the " concern " 
to each employe; the results attained by A, B, and C are then 
totalled, analyzed, charted, and posted in conspicuous places 
where all may see, admire, and take warning. In the majority 
of up-to-date houses " suggestions " for the expansion or im- 
provement of the business are not only welcomed but expected, 
and the employe who does not produce them in reasonable bulk 
and quality is slated for the " discard." When inventiveness 
tires, " shake-ups " on a scale unknown in England take place. 



AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT 483 

and new aspirants eager to " make good " step into the shoes of 
the old. The business athletes strain and pant toward the 
goal. There is no rest for the young man " consecrated " to 
merchandising effort. Like the fly in the fable, he must strug- 
gle and swim until the milk around his legs is churned into the 
butter of executive position. 

The American press, hybrid, highly coloured, and often 
written by men of vagrant genius who prefer the sorry wages 
of news writing to the commercial yoke, conveys but a partial 
idea of this absorption of an entire race in a single function. 
A far more vivid impression is to be gained from the '' house 
organs," and publicity pamphlets which pour from the press 
in an unceasing stream and the production of which within 
recent years has become a large and lucrative industry. Here 
articles and symposia on such themes as " Building Character 
into Salesmanship," " Hidden Forces that bring Sales," and 
" Capitalizing Individuality," often adorned with half-tones of 
tense and joyless faces, recur on every page. No sanctuary 
is inviolable, no recess unexplored. The demand of the com- 
mercial God is for the soul, and he will be content with no less. 

This demand implies a revised conception of the relation 
between employe and employer. The old contract under 
which time and effort were hired for so many hours a day at a 
stated remuneration, leaving life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness outside those hours a matter of personal predilec- 
tion, is now abrogated, or at least sharply questioned. It is rec- 
ognized, and with entire logic, that the measure of accomplish- 
ment within working hours will depend largely on the environ- 
ment amid which hours of recreation are spent; and that 
though detection of inefficiency is a task of keen brains that 
seldom fail, this detection, in the nature of things, may not 
take place until damage has been done the commercial struc- 
ture. This is the real inwardness of a whole new gospel of 
" Welfare " and " Uplift," under whose dispensation employes 
are provided with simple and tested specifics for recreation, 
with the watchful and benevolent eye of department heads 
upon them, in which it is presumed and stated with entire can- 
dour that the physical, moral, and mental efficiency of the 
staffs and " salesforce " has become the concern of the or- 



484 CIVILIZATION 

ganization that has allotted them a place in its economy. The 
organism works, plays, rests, moves on together. 

Nothing is more terrifying, as that master of terror, Edgar 
Allan Poe, perceived, than an organism that is at once mean 
and colossal. Properties of efficiency and adaptation to one 
definite end are bestowed in an eminent degree only on the 
lower orders of animal life. With rigid bodies, encasing or- 
gans that are designed for simple, metabolic purposes, armed 
with an elaborate mechanism of claws, hinges^ borers, valves, 
and suckers the lepidoptera are living tools that fly or creep. 
Absorbed in one tireless function, with all distractions of love 
and war delegated to specialized subspecies, they neither love, 
hate, nor rebel. As the scale ascends, efficiency dwindles, un- 
til in the litter and loneliness of the den, lazy domesticity 
with dam and cubs, the joy of prey hunt and love hunt, be- 
tween the belly pinch of hunger and the sleep of repletion, the 
lives of the big carnivora pass in a sheer joy of living for liv- 
ing's sake until the gun of the hunter ends the day dream. 

It has been left for man — hapless and inventive — to realize 
a life that touches both ends of the scale, to feel at his heart 
the pull of hive-life and jungle-life in turn. Something of the 
ant and something of the tiger lurks in every normal human 
creature. If he has immense powers of assertion, his faculty 
for abdication seems to be as limitless. It is just this dual 
nature in man that makes prophecy as to what " will happen 
the world " so difficult and unsafe. But one prophecy may be 
ventured on and that is, that in proportion as acquiescence or 
revolt seize the imaginations of separated nations will those 
nations coalesce or drift apart into antagonism. 

If a life spent during the last twenty years between 
England and the United States is any title to judge, I 
should say that at the present moment the dominant note 
in America is acquiescence in, and in England revolt against 
the inordinate demands of commercialism. Here, to all ap- 
pearances, the surrender for the moment is complete. There 
are revolts, but they are sporadic and misguided and their 
speedy suppression seems to stir no indignation and to 
awaken no thrill of common danger among the body of 
workers. Strikes confined to wage issues are treated more in- 



AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT 485 

dulgently, but even they are generally strangled at their birth 
by injunctions, and a sour or hostile attitude of authority 
makes success difficult. In any display of opposition to estab- 
lished conditions, even when based on the most technical 
grounds, authority appears to sense a challenge to larger is- 
sues and to meet them half way with a display of force that 
to an Englishman appears strangely over-adequate. It is evi- 
dent the ground is being tested. Interpretations of liberty that 
date from easier and roomier days are under revision, and 
where they are found at variance with a conception of society 
as a disciplined and productive force, they are being roughly 
retrenched. The prevailing character of the labour mass, at 
once heterogeneous and amorphous, makes it a safe and ductile 
medium for almost any social experiment. "If you don't like 
it, go back," is an argument to which no answer has been 
found. Native-born labour shares in the universal dis-esteem 
and takes refuge from it in aristocratic and doctrinaire federa- 
tions whose ineffectiveness is apparent whenever a labour is- 
sue arises. For the rebel who, under these conditions, chooses 
to fight on, rougher methods are found. He may become jera 
natura. Tarring and feathering, ducking and rubbing with 
acid, and deportation from State to State may be his por- 
tion. Under any social condition conformity is the easiest 
course. When the prison cell and social pillory are its 
alternatives, to resist requires a degree of fanatical courage 
and interior moral resources possessed only by a handful of 
men in a generation. 

To this conception of a disciplined community harnessed to 
the purpose of production, thousands of the possessing and 
capitalistic classes look wistfully from the other side of the 
Atlantic. But there are many obstacles to its realization in 
England. The English proletarian is no uprooted orphan, pay- 
ing with docile and silent work for the citizenship of his chil- 
dren and grandchildren. That great going concern, the British 
Empire, is his personal work, built on the bones and cemented 
with the blood of his forebears. His enfranchisement is as com- 
plete as his disinheritance, and the impoverishment of his coun- 
try, evidenced in the stream of gold that pours Westward like 
arterial blood, has not reached to his spirit. Even the Great 



486 CIVILIZATION 

War, with its revelation to him of how ruthless and compre- 
hensive the demands of the State on the individual can be, 
has only reinforced his sense of being a very deserving person 
and has added to the long debt which he is frankly out to 
collect. The promises, the appeals to national pride and tra- 
dition with which he had to be appeased while, for the first time 
in his history, the yoke of universal service was laid upon his 
neck, trip up the feet of his rulers to-day. It is difficult to 
tell him to go elsewhere, for he " belongs " in England. Even 
suggestions that he should emigrate wholesale to British colo- 
nies in order to relieve the congested labour market are re- 
ceived with mocking laughter in which a threat lurks. He is, 
I am sure, because I know him, looking on with a certain sar- 
donic relish and enjoyment at the flurries, the perplexities of 
his rulers, their displays of force alternated with appeals to 
sweet reason, their brave words succeeded by abject denials 
and qualifications. He is waiting until the naked economic 
question, which he knows well underlies all the rhodomontade 
of national greatness and imperial heritage, shall be put to 
him. It will be a great and momentous day when the Eng- 
lishman is given his choice. A choice it must be. The means 
to compulsion are not here. 

To America just now Europeans as a whole must seem a 
helpless race, bewildered actors in a vast and tragic blunder. 
To thousands of Red Cross workers. Knights of Columbus, 
and welfare auxiliaries in devastated districts, the spectacle of 
suffering and want must have come home to reinforce impres- 
sions already gained from sights witnessed at Ellis Island or 
Long Wharf. None the less, it is an historical misfortune that 
the first real contact between the people of the two continents 
should have come at a time when the older was bankrupt and 
had little to show save the rags and tatters of its civilization. 
The reverse of the tenderness to the stricken European abroad 
has been a hardening of the heart to the immigrant at home, 
and it is difficult for the American, schoolmaster and lawgiver 
to so many alien peoples in his own country, to divest himself 
of a didactic character in his foreign relations. To many 
countries he is " saying it with flour," and those who accept the 



AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT 487 

dole can do little else than swallow the sermon. Even to those 
countries who were his allies he does shine forth in a certain 
splendour of righteousness. His sacrifice was deliberate — 
which is, perhaps, its best excuse for being a little con- 
scious. It was self-imposed, and fifty thousand of his dead, 
wrested from productive enterprises to lie in France, attest 
its sincerity. No Englishman, at any rate, believes in his 
heart that its material reward, great and inevitable as it is 
now seen to be, was the driving force at the time the sacrifice 
was accepted. There are a host of reasons, some creditable, 
others less so, that make Europe curb its restiveness under 
American homilies. 

With England the case is different. No one knows just 
how hard Britain has been hit, but she is managing to put a 
good face on her wounds. No relief organization from the 
big sister has landed its khaki-clad apostles of hygiene and 
its grey-cloaked sisters of mercy on English shores. The fa- 
cade is intact, the old masters in possession. With a few shifts 
and changes in political labelling that are a matter of domestic 
concern, those who steered the big concern into the bank- 
ruptcy of war are still entrusted with its extrication. No great 
subversion stands as a witness of a change of national faith. 
The destinies, the foreign relations, the aspects that attract 
or antagonize remain in the hands of men who secured a fresh 
lease of power by a clever political trick. The skeleton at the 
feast of racial reunion is not Ireland, nor Mesopotamia, nor 
Yap, nor the control of the seas. It is the emergence into 
political power, sooner or later, but inevitably from the very 
nature of British political institutions, of the British proletariat. 

Frankly I do not see, when this moment arrives, who is 
going to put the gospel of American civilization into terms that 
will be, I shall not say acceptable, but even significant, to the 
emancipated British worker. Ruling classes in the older 
country who rely on a steadying force from across the Atlan- 
tic in possible political upheavals must have strange misgivings 
when they take account of their own stewardship. It will be 
an ungrateful task to preach the doctrine of salvation through 
work to a people that has tried it out so logically and com- 
pletely that the century which has seen the commercial su- 



488 CIVILIZATION 

premacy of their country has witnessed the progressive im- 
poverishment and proletarization of its people. Homilies on 
discipline will sound strangely in the ears of those who, while 
America was enjoying her brief carnival of spacious and fruit- 
ful endeavour in a virgin land, went under an industrial yoke 
that has galled their necks and stunted their physical growth. 
Appeals to pride of race will have little meaning coming from 
a stock that has ceased through self-indulgence or economic 
upward pressure to resist ethnographically and whose char- 
acteristics are disappearing in the general amalgam. 

The salient fact that stands out from all history is that in- 
ordinateness of any sort has never failed to act upon the Eng- 
lish character as a challenge. His successes, whatever his libel- 
lists may seek to believe, have seldom been against the small 
or weak. It has been his destiny, in one recurrent crisis after 
another, to find himself face to face with some claimant to 
world power, some " cock of the walk." To use a homely 
phrase, it has always been " up to him." And the vision of 
his adversary which has nerved his arm has always been an 
excess in some quality easily understandable by the average 
man. Bigotry is not the monopoly of the Spaniard, nor com- 
mercial greed of the Hollander, nor vanity of the Frenchman, 
nor pomposity of the German. It would be an easy task to 
convict the Englishman of some share in each vice. Never- 
theless history in the main has justified his instinct for propor- 
tion, his dislike for " slopping over." In something far be- 
yond the accepted phrase, the English struggle has been a 
struggle for the " balance of power." 

Henry L, Stuart 



II. AS AN IRISHMAN SEES IT 

THE application of the term " shirt-sleeve " to American 
diplomacy is perhaps the most concise expression of the 
conception we have formed in Europe of life in the United 
States. We imagine that it is only necessary to cross the At- 
lantic Ocean to find a people young and vigorous in its emanci- 
pation from ancient forms and obsolete ceremonies. The aver- 
age visitor returns, after a brief tour through the more urbane 
centres of European imitation, and tries to startle us with a 
narrative in which a few picturesque crudities are supposed to 
indicate the democratic ease of American civilization. His 
mind is filled with an incoherent jumble of skyscrapers, ex- 
press elevators, ice water, chewing-gum, and elevated railroads, 
so that his inevitable contribution to the literature relating to 
America becomes the mere chronicle of a tourist's experiences. 
Every deviation from European practice is emphasized, and in 
proportion to the writer's consequent personal discomfort, he 
will conjure up a hideous picture of uncouthness, whose ef- 
fect is to confirm us in our estimate of American progress . . . 
or barbarism, as the case may be. If the critical stranger 
happens to be a well-known poet or dramatist, he will prob- 
ably succeed in passing lightly over those minor inconven- 
iences, which the generosity of wealthy admirers has pre- 
vented him from experiencing at first hand. 

The consequence is that there is no subject more hopelessly 
involved in a cloud of voluminous complaint and banal lauda- 
tion than American life as seen by the foreigner. Neither the 
enthusiasts nor the fault-finders have contributed much of any 
assistance either to Europeans or to the Americans themselves. 
The former accept America at its own valuation, the latter 
complain of precisely those things upon which the average citi- 
zen prides himself. It is not easy to decide which class of 
critics has helped most effectively to perpetuate the legend of 
American freedom; the minor commentators who hold democ- 

489 



490 CIVILIZATION 

racy to be the cause of every offence, or the higher critics, like 
Viscount Bryce, who, finding no American commonwealth, pro- 
ceeded to invent one. The objectors are dismissed as wit- 
nesses to the incapacity of the servile European to appreciate 
true liberty and equality; the well-disposed are gratefully re- 
ceived as evangelists of a gospel to which A.mericans subscribe 
without excessive introspection. There is something touching 
in the gratitude felt towards the author of " The American 
Commonwealth." Who would have believed that a foreigner, 
and a Britisher at that, could make a monument of such im- 
posing brick with the straws of political oratory in the United 
States? 

On one point all observers have involuntarily agreed. 
Whether with approval or disapproval, they have depicted for 
us a society which presents such marked divergencies from 
our own manners and customs that there is not one of us but 
comes to America believing that his best or worst hopes will 
be confirmed. It is, therefore, somewhat disconcerting to 
confess that neither presentment has been realized. To have 
passed from Continental Europe to New York, via London, 
is to deprive oneself of that social and intellectual shock which 
is responsible for the uniformly profound impression which 
transatlantic conditions make upon the European mind. So 
many continentals enjoy in the United States their first direct 
contact with Anglo-Saxon institutions and modes of thought 
that the revelation cannot fail to stimulate them. Their writ- 
ings frequently testify to a naive ignorance of the prior exist- 
ence in England of what excites their dismay or admiration in 
America. If it be asked why, then, have Englishmen simi- 
larly reacted to the same stimuli, if acquaintance with England 
blunts the fine edge of perception, the reply must be: the 
quality of their emotion is different. The impression made 
upon a mind formed by purely Latin traditions necessarily 
differs from that received by a mind previously subjected to 
Anglo-Saxon influences. Consequently, the student of Ameri- 
can life who has neither the motive of what might be called 
family jealousy, in the Englishman, nor the mentality, wholly 
innocent of alien culture, of the Latin, would seem well 
equipped to view the subject from another angle. 



AS AN IRISHMAN SEES IT 491 

To the good European the most striking characteristic of 
the United States is a widespread intellectual anaemia. So far 
from exhibiting those traits of freedom and progress which 
harrow the souls of sensitive aristocrats in Europe, the Ameri- 
can people alarm the outsider in search of stimulating ideas 
by their devotion to conventions and formulae. As soon as one 
has learnt to discount those lesser manifestations of independ- 
ence, whose perilous proximity to discourtesy gives them an 
exaggerated importance in the eyes of superficial critics, the 
conventionality of the American becomes increasingly evident. 
So many foreigners have been misled — mainly because of an 
apparent rudeness — by this show of equality, this ungracious- 
ness in matters of service, that one hesitates at first to dis- 
miss the unconventional American as a myth closely related 
to that of the " immoral Frenchman." It is only when pro- 
longed association has revealed the timid respectability beneath 
this veneer of informality that it becomes possible to under- 
stand the true position of America. From questioning indi- 
viduals one proceeds to an examination of the public utterances 
of prominent men, and the transition from the press to litera- 
ture is easily made. At length comes the discovery that men- 
tally the United States is a generation or two behind Western 
Europe. The rude and vigorous young democracy, cited by 
its admirers in extenuation of aesthetic sins of omission and 
commission, suddenly stands forth attired in the garment of 
ideas which clothed early Victorian England. 

This condition is largely due to the absence of an educated 
class accustomed to leisure. To the American work for work's 
sake has a dignity unknown in Europe, where it is rare to find 
anybody working for mere wages if he has any means of inde- 
pendent subsistence, however small. In America the contrary 
is the case, and people who could afford to cultivate their own 
personalities prefer to waste their energies upon some definite 
business. Almost all the best that has come out of Europe 
has been developed in that peculiar class which sacrificed 
money-making for the privilege of leisure and relative inde- 
pendence. The only corresponding class in the United States 
is that of the college professors, who are an omnipresent men- 
ace to the free interplay of ideas. Terrorized by economic 



492 CIVILIZATION 

fears and intellectual inhibitions, they have no independence. 
They are despised by the plain people because of their failure 
to make money; and to them are relegated all matters which 
are considered of slight moment, namely, learning and the arts. 
In these fields the pedants rule unchallenged, save when some 
irate railroad presidents discover in their teachings the heresy 
of radicalism. ^Esthetics is a science as incomprehensible to 
them as beauty, and they prefer to substitute the more homely 
Christian ethics. Moral preoccupations are their sole test of 
excellence. The views of these gentlemen and their favourite 
pupils fill the bookshelves and the news-stands. 

The professorial guardians of Colonial precedents and tradi- 
tions determine what the intellectual life of America shall be. 
Hence the cult of anaemia. Instead of writing out of them- 
selves and their own lives, they aspire to nothing greater than 
to be classed as English. They are obsessed by the standards 
imposed from without, and their possible achievement is 
thwarted. While they are still shaking their heads over Poe, 
and trying to decide whether Whitman is respectable, a na- 
tional literature is growing up without the guidance and help 
which it should expect from them. At the same time, as the 
official pundits have the ear of Europe, and particularly of 
England, American culture is known only as they reflect it. 
It is natural, therefore, that the European attitude should be 
as contemptuous as it so often is. 

When the reviews publish some ignorant and patronizing 
dissertation on the American novel or American poetry, by an 
English writer, they are pained by the evident lack of appre- 
ciation. The ladies and gentlemen whose works are respect- 
fully discussed by the professors, and warmly recommended by 
the reviewers, do not seem to receive the consideration due to 
them for their unflinching adherence to the noblest standards 
of academic criticism. When these torch-bearers of the purest 
Colonial tradition are submitted to the judgment of their 
" big " cousins in England, there is a noticeable condescension 
in those foreigners. But why should they profess to admire 
as the brightest stars in the American firmament what are, 
after all, the phosphorescent gleams of literary ghosts? Is 
it any wonder that the majority of Britishers can continue ki 



AS AN IRISHMAN SEES IT 493 

the comfortable belief that there is practically no American 
literature worthy of serious attention? 

The academic labours of American professors of literature 
are an easy and constant butt for English critics. Yet, they 
rarely think of questioning the presentation of literary Amer- 
ica for which these gentlemen are so largely responsible. When 
have the Stuart Shermans and Paul Elmer Mores (and their 
diminutives) recognized the existence of a living American 
writer of genius, originality, or distinction? The only justi- 
fication for their existences is their alleged capacity to esti- 
mate literary values. If they cannot do so, it is hardly sur- 
prising that their English patrons, who imagine that they are 
representative men, do not often penetrate the veil of Colonial- 
ism. Whatever their outward professions, the majority of 
Englishmen regard all other English-speaking countries as 
Colonies. Since they are stubborn enough when faced with 
undeniable proof of the contrary, as in Ireland, it is unlikely 
they will persuade themselves unaided that they are mistaken. 
When will American criticism have the courage to base the 
claims of contemporary literature on those works which are 
essentially and unmistakably American? 

The mandarins, of course, have stood for reaction in all 
countries, and there is no intention here to acquit the Euro- 
pean of the species. So many of his worst outrages are mat- 
ters of history that it would be futile to pretend that he is un- 
true to type. Nevertheless, his position in Europe is measurably 
more human than in this country, owing to the greater freedom 
of intellectual intercourse. In America the mandarin is firmly 
established on a pedestal which rests upon the vast ,unculture 
of an immense immigrant population, enjoying for the first 
time the benefits of sufficient food and heat. He is obviously 
secure in his conviction that those qualified to challenge him 
— except perhaps some isolated individual — are not likely to 
do so, being of the same convention as himself. He belongs 
to the most perfect trade-union, one which has a practical mo- 
nopoly of its labour. His European colleagues, on the con- 
trary, live in constant dread of traitors from their ranks, or 
worse still, the advance of an opposing force manned with 
brains of no inferior calibre. France, for example, can boast 



494 CIVILIZATION 

of a remarkable roll of names which never adorned the coun- 
cils of pedantry^ or not until they had imposed a new tradi- 
tion. The two finest minds of modern French literature, Ana- 
tole France and Remy de Gourmont, are illustrations of this 
fact. France has never allowed his academic honours to 
restrict the daring play of his ideas; Gourmont died in the 
admiration of all cultivated m.en, although his life was a pro- 
longed protest against the orthodox, who never succeeded in 
taming him. 

What America requires is an unofficial intelligentsia as 
strong and as articulate as the political and literary pundits, 
whose purely negative attitude first exasperates, and finally 
sterilizes, every impulse towards originality. Only when a sur- 
vey is made of the leading figures in the various departments 
of American life is it possible fully to realize the weight of 
inertia which presses upon the intellect of the country. While 
the spirit of enterprise and progress is stimulated and encour- 
aged in all that relates to material advancement, the artistic 
and reasoning faculties are deadened. Scientific study, when 
directed to obviously practical ends, is the only form of mental 
effort which can count upon recognition and reward. It is not 
without its significance that the Johns Hopkins Medical School 
is the one learned institution in America whose fame is world- 
wide amongst those who appreciate original research, other- 
wise the names of few universities are mentioned outside aca- 
demic circles. Even in the field of orthodox literary culture 
the mandarins have, in the main, failed to do anything posi- 
tive. They have preferred to bury their talent in anaemic 
commentary. The reputed intellectuals are still living on a 
tradition bequeathed by the attenuated transcendentalism of 
the Bostonian era. 

That tradition was, after all, but a refinement of the no- 
torious Puritanism of New England. Having lost whatever 
semblance of dignity the Emersons and Thoreaus conferred 
upon it, its subsequent manifestations have been a decadent 
reversion to aboriginal barbarism. This retrograde move- 
ment, so far as it affects social life, is noticeable in the ever- 
increasing number of crusades and taboos, the constant prob- 
ing of moral and industrial conditions, unrelated to any well- 



1 



AS AN IRISHMAN SEES IT 495 

considered desire for improvement, or intelligent conception 
of progress. The orgies of prohibition and suppression are 
unbelievable to the civilized European, who has no experience 
of a community in which everything from alcohol to Sunday 
tennis has attracted the attention of the " virtuosi of vice " — ■ 
to quote the phrase of a discerning critic. Innumerable com- 
missions, committees, and boards of enquiry supplement the 
muck-raking of yellow journalism, and encourage espionage in 
social reformers. But what has the country to show for this? 
Probably the greatest number of bungled, unsolved, and mis- 
understood problems of all industrial nations of the same 
rank. 

These debauches of virtue, however, are the direct outcome 
of the mental conditions fostered by those who are in a posi- 
tion to mould public opinion. The crowd which tolerates, 
or participates in, the Puritanical frenzy is merely reflecting 
the current political and social doctrine of the time. Occa- 
sionally the newspapers will hold a symposium, or the reviews 
will invite the aid of some foreign critic, to ascertain the rea- 
sons for the prevailing puerility of American fiction. Inva- 
riably it is urged, and rightly, that the novel is written by 
women for women. Where almost all articles of luxury are 
produced for female consumption, and the arts are deemed 
unessential to progress, the latter are naturally classed with 
uneconomic production destined to amuse the idle. They are 
left to the women, as the men explain, who have not yet un- 
derstood the true dignity of leisure. They are abandoned, 
in other words, to the most unreal section of the community, 
to those centres of culture, the drama leagues and literary 
clubs, composed of male and female spinsters. Needless to 
say, any phrase or idea likely to have disturbed a mid-Victorian 
vicarage will be ruled out as unseemly. 

The malady of intellectual anaemia is not restricted to any 
one department of American life. In politics, as in art and 
literature, there is a dread of reality. The emasculation of 
thought in general is such as to render colourless the ideas 
commonly brought to the attention of the public. Perhaps the 
most palpable example of this penchant for platitude is the 
substantial literature of a pseudo-philosophic character which 



496 CIVILIZATION 

encumbers the book-stores, and is read by thousands of right- 
thinking citizens. Namby-pamby works, it is true, exist to 
some extent in all Protestant countries, but their number, 
prevalence, and cost in America are evidence of the demand 
they must meet. It is not for nothing that the books of 
thoughtful writers are crowded from shelves amply stocked 
with the meditations of an Orison Swett Marden, a Henry van 
Dyke, or a Hamilton Wright Mabie — to mention at random 
some typical authors. 

These moral soothsayers successfully compete with moving- 
picture actors^ and novelists whose claim to distinction is their 
ability to write the best-seller of the season. If they addressed 
themselves only to the conventicles, the phenomenon would 
have less significance, but the conventicles have their own 
minor prophets. The conclusion, therefore, suggests itself, 
that these must be the leaders and moulders of American 
thought. The suspicion is confirmed when men of the same 
stamp, sometimes, indeed, the actual authors of this evangeli- 
cal literature, are found holding the most important public 
offices. To have written a methodist-tract would appear to be 
an unfailing recommendation for promotion. It is rare to 
find the possessor of such a mentality relegated to the ob- 
scurit}^ he deserves. 

A wish to forestall the accusation of exaggeration or in- 
accuracy imposes the painful obligation of citing specific in- 
stances of the tendency described. Who are the leading 
public men of this country, and what have they written? Be- 
sides the classic volumes of Thiers and Guizot must we set 
such amiable puerilities as " The New Freedom," " On Being 
Human," and " When a Man Comes to Himself." Even the 
essays of Raymond Poincare do not sound the depths indicated 
by the mere titles of these presidential works. But the author 
of "The State," for all his antiquated theories of government, 
writes measurably above the level of that diplomatist whose 
copious bibliography includes numerous variations upon such 
themes as "The Gospel for a World of Sin," "The First 
Christmas Tree," and " The Blue Flower." A search through 
the underworld of parish magazines in England, France, and 
Germany would probably reveal something to be classed with 



AS AN IRISHMAN SEES IT 497 

the works of Dr. Lyman Abbott, but the authors would not 
be entrusted with the editorship of a leading weekly review. 
As for the writings of his associate, the existence of his book 
on Shakespeare is a testimony to Anglo-Saxon indifference to 
the supreme genius of the race. 

It is hardly necessary to dwell upon the literary labours of 
William Jennings Bryan, ex-Secretary of State, except to won- 
der that they did not alone suffice to disqualify him for such 
an office. They belong to the same category as those volumes 
of popular American philosophy whose titles are: " Charac- 
ter the Grandest Thing in the World," " Cheerfulness as a Life 
Power," and "The Miracle of Right Thought." If those 
quoted are to be laid to the charge of Mr. Orison Swett Marden, 
every department of American life contains prominent men 
who might say: There, but for the grace of God, speak I. The 
sanctimonious breath of the uplifter tarnishes the currency 
of ideas in almost every circle of society. Irrespective of 
party. Republicans, Democrats, and Socialists help to build up 
this monument of platitude which may one day mark the rest- 
ing place of the American brain. Books, reviews, magazines, 
and newspapers are largely conceived in the evangelical spirit. 
The average contributor, when not a foreigner, suggests a 
Sunday-school superintendent who has (perhaps) missed his 
vocation. Where the subject excludes the pedantry of the 
professors, the tone is intensely moral, and the more it is so 
the surer one may be that the writer is a colonel, a rear- 
admiral, or a civil officer of the State or Federal government. 
Imagination refuses to conceive these functionaries as fulfilling 
their duties efficiently in any service, other than that of the 
Salvation Army or a revivahst campaign. 

The stage of culture which these phenomena presuppose can- 
not but be hostile to artistic development in such as escape 
contamination. It has already been postulated that the just 
claims of ethics and aesthetics are hopelessly confounded in 
America, to the evident detriment of art in all its branches. 
To the poor quality of the current political and social phi- 
losophy corresponds an equally mediocre body of literary 
criticism. A recent historian of American literature accords 
a high place amongst contemporary critics, to the author of 



498 CIVILIZATION 

" Shelburne Essays," and other works. These volumes are 
dignified as " our nearest approach to those ' Causeries du 
Lundi ' of an earlier age," and may well be taken as repre- 
sentative. Typical of the cold inhumanity which a certain 
type of " cultured person " deems essential is the circumstance 
related, by Mr. Paul Elmer More himself, in explanation of 
the genesis of these essays. " In a secluded spot," he writes, 
" in the peaceful valley of the Androscoggin I took upon my- 
self to live two years as a hermit," and " Shelburne Essays " 
was the fruit of his solitary mediations. The historian is 
mightily impressed by this evidence of superiority. " In an- 
other and far more unusual way he qualified himself for his 
high office of critic," says Professor Pattee, " he immured him- 
self for two years in solitude." ..." The period gave him 
time to read leisurely, thoughtfully, with no nervous subcon- 
sciousness that the product of that reading was to be mar- 
ketable." 

What a revelation of combined timidity and intellectual 
snobbishness there is in this attitude so fatuously endorsed 
by a writer for the schools! We can imagine what the effect 
of such a pose must be upon the minds of the students whom 
the professor would constrain to respect. Only a young prig 
could pretend to be favourably impressed by this pseudo- 
Thoreau in the literary backwoods. The impulse of most 
healthy young men would be to turn in contempt from an art 
so unnatural as this conception of criticism implies. How are 
they to know that the Taines, Sainte-Beuves, Brunetieres, and 
Arnolds of the world are not produced by expedients so primi- 
tive as to suggest the mise en scene of some latter-day Messiah, 
a Dowie, or a Mrs. Baker Eddy? The heralds of new theolo- 
gies may find the paraphernalia of asceticism and aloofness a 
useful part of their stock in trade — neither is associated with 
the great criticism of literature. The causeries of Sainte-Beuve 
were not written in an ivory tower, yet they show no traces 
of that " nervous subconsciousness " which our professor finds 
inseparable from reading that is " marketable." 

The suspicion of insincerity in this craving for the wilder- 
ness will be strengthened by reference to the first of Mr. 
More's volumes. Whatever may have been the case of its 



AS AN IRISHMAN SEES IT 499 

successors, this work was certainly the product of his retire- 
ment. What, then, are the subjects of such a delicate nature 
that they could not be discussed within the sound of " the 
noisy jargon of the market-place "? Of the eleven essays, 
only four deal with writers whose proximity to the critic's own 
age might justify a retreat, in order that they be judged im- 
partially, and without reference to popular enthusiasm and the 
prevalent fashion of the moment. The seven most substantial 
studies in the book are devoted to flogging horses so dead that 
no fear of their kicking existed. " A Hermit's Notes on Tho- 
reau," " The Solitude of Nathaniel Hawthorne," " The Origins 
of Hawthorne and Poe," " The Influence of Emerson," " The 
Spirit of Carlyle " — these are a few of the startling topics 
which Mr. More could discuss only with fasting and prayer! 
Any European schoolmaster could have written these essays in 
the leisure moments of his Sunday afternoons or Easter vaca- 
tion. 

No more remarkable profundity or originality will be found 
in the critic's essays in contemporary literature. His strictures 
upon Lady Gregory's versions of the Irish epic, and his com- 
ments upon the Celtic Renaissance in general are the com- 
monplaces of all hostile English criticism. " The shimmering 
hues of decadence rather than the strong colours of life " is 
the phrase in which he attempts to estimate the poetry of the 
Literary Revival in Ireland. In fact, for all his isolation Mr. 
More was obsessed by the critical cant of the hour, as witness 
his readiness to apply the term " decadent " to all and sundry. 
The work of Arthur Symons is illuminated by this appellation, 
as is also that of W. B. Yeats. The jargon of the literary 
market-place, to vary Mr. More's own cliche, is all that he 
seems to have found in that " peaceful valley of the Andros- 
coggin." Even poor Tolstoy is branded as " a decadent with 
the humanitarian superimposed," an application of the word 
which renders its previous employment meaningless. As a 
crowning example of incomprehension may be cited Mr. More's 
opinion that the English poet, Lionel Johnson, is " the one great 
. . . and genuinely significant poet of the present Gaelic move- 
ment." In the circumstances, it is not surprising that he 
should pronounce Irishmen incapable of exploiting adequately 



500 CIVILIZATION 

the themes of Celtic literature. For this task he considers 
the Saxon genius more qualified. 

With these examples before us it is unnecessary to examine 
the remaining volumes of " Shelburne Essays." Having 
started with a distorted conception of the critical office, the 
author naturally contributed nothing helpful to the literature 
of American criticism. His laborious platitudes do not help us 
to a better appreciation of the dead, his dogmatic hostility nul- 
lifies his judgments upon the living. Not once has he a word 
of discerning censure or encouragement for any rising talent. 
Like most of his colleagues, Mr. More prefers to exercise his 
faculties at the expense of reputations already established, save 
when he condescends to repeat the commonplaces of complaint 
against certain of the better known modern writers. He is 
so busy with Mrs. Gaskell, Charles Lamb, Milton, Plato, and 
Dickens that he can find time to mention only some fifteen 
Americans, not one of them living. 

Such is the critic whom Professor Pattee salutes as " con- 
sistent " and " courageous," having " standards of criticism " 
which make him comparable to Sainte-Beuve. As editor of 
" the leading critical review of America," we are assured that 
Mr. More had " a dominating clientele and a leader's author- 
ity." Alas! There can be no doubt as to this, though it is 
very doubtful if the fact can be regarded as " one of the most 
promising signs for that new literary era which already is over- 
due." That era will long continue overdue while criticism 
remains absorbed in the past, aloof from life and implacably 
hostile to every manifestation of originality. If the new liter- 
ary generation were merely ignored its lot would be compara- 
tively happy. But the mandarins come down periodically 
from their Olympic communings with George Eliot and Soc- 
rates, to fill the reviews with verbose denunciations of what- 
ever is being written independently of their idols. The oracles 
having spoken, the newcomers are left with an additional 
obstacle in the way of their reaching the indifferent ear of the 
crowd. The crowd wallows in each season's literary novelties, 
satisfied that whatever is well advertised is good. Rather than 
face the subjects endorsed by the frigid enthusiasm of Mr. Paul 
Elmer More or Stuart Sherman, Mr. W. C. Browne!! and 



AS AN IRISHMAN SEES IT 501 

Professor Brander Matthews, it takes refuge in fields where 
the writ cf pedantry does not run. Meanwhile, the task of 
welcoming new talent is left to amiable journalists, whose 
casual recommendations, usually without any background of 
critical experience, are accepted as the judgments of compe- 
tent experts. The " colyumist " has to perform the true func- 
tion of the critic. 

Although anaemia is the dominant characteristic of intellec- 
tual life in the United States, the reaction against that condi- 
tion is none the less worthy of notice. When we remember 
that the fervour of righteousness is the very breath of current 
philosophy, we are also reminded that crudeness, sensational- 
ism, and novelty are commonly held by Europeans to be the 
quintessence of America. It might be replied, in answer to 
this objection, that Hearst newspapers, and the vaudeville the- 
ology of Billy Sunday, are the only alternatives to the prim 
conventionality of authoritative journalism, and the sanctimoni- 
ousness of popular leaders. The man in the street obtains the 
illusion of strenuous cerebral activity when he contrasts the 
homely qualities of those prophets of democracy with the 
spinster-like propriety and beatific purity of prominent pub- 
licists and statesmen. He likes to hear his master's voice, 
it is true, but he likes even more to hear his own, especially 
where his personal interests are at issue. The aesthetic obiter 
dicta of the professors, like the language of diplomacy, are 
concerned with questions sufficiently remote to make sonority 
an acceptable substitute for thought. 

In the realm of ideas, nevertheless, there is a more or less 
articulate expression of reaction, mainly concentrated in the 
larger cities of the East. There the professional supermen and 
their female counterparts have come together by tacit agree- 
ment, and have attempted to shake off the incubus of respec- 
tability. The extremists impress one as being overpowered by 
a sense of their own sinful identity. In a wild burst of hys- 
terical revolt they are plunged into a debauch of ideas from 
which they are emerging in a very shaken and parlous condi- 
tion. For the most part their adventures, mental and other- 
wise, have been in the domain of sex, with a resultant flood- 
ing of the " radical " market by varied tomes upon the subject. 



502 CIVILIZATION 

What the bookstores naively catalogue as the literature of 
advanced thought is a truly wonderful salade russe, in which 
Krafft-Ebbing and Forel compete with Freud and Eugene 
Debs. Karl Marx, and Signora Montessori, Professor Scott 
Nearing, and Havelock Ellis engage the same attention as the 
neo-Malthusian pamphleteers, and the young ladies whose nov- 
els tell of what Flaubert called " les souillures du manage et 
les platitudes de V adulter e." 

The natural morbidity of the Puritan mind is exasperated 
in advanced circles, whose interest is nothing if not catholic. 
Let Brieux discourse of venereal disease, or Strindberg ex- 
pound his tragedies of prurience, their success is assured 
amongst those who would believe them geniuses, rather than 
risk the ignominy of agreement with the champions of ortho- 
doxy. So long as our European pornographers are serious 
and inartistic, they need have no fear of America. Unbal- 
anced by prolonged contemplation of the tedious virtues of 
New England, a generation has arisen whose great illusion 
is that the transvaluation of all values may be effected by 
promiscuity. Lest they should ever incur the suspicion of 
conservatism the emancipated have a permanent welcome for 
everything that is strange or new. The blush on the cheek of 
the vice-crusader is their criterion of excellence. 

By an irony of fate, however, they are condemned to the 
disheartening spectacle of their moral bogies being received 
into a society but one removed from the Olympians themselves. 
In recent years it has been the practice of the latter to accept 
certain reputations, when they have passed through the sieve 
of the literary clubs and drama leagues. In fact, candidates 
for academic immortality frequently serve on the board of 
these literary filtration plants. While the mandarins execute 
their ritual in the cult of Longfellow and Bryant, and excom- 
municate heretical moderns, their servitors are engaged upon 
an ingenious task. They discover the more innocuous subjects 
of " radical " enthusiasm, deprive them of whatever sting of 
originality their work possesed, and then submit the result 
discreetly to the official pundits. When these judges have 
satisfied themselves as to the sterility of the innovations, their 
imprimatur is granted, and another mediocrity is canonized. 



AS AN IRISHMAN SEES IT 503 

Ibsen is saluted because of his " message," and " Anna 
Karenina " becomes a masterpiece, because Tolstoy was a 
Christian. While remarkable talents at home are ignored or 
vilified, the fifth-rate European is in the process of literary- 
naturalization. Mr. Masefield receives the benediction of Paul 
Elmer More, who in the same breath tries to convince us that 
he is qualified to pronounce " The Spoon River Anthology " a 
bad joke. 

Nothing more clearly demonstrates the futility and disrepute 
of criticism in this country than the constant surrenders to 
the prestige of the foreigner. A cheap fashion in European 
literature has only to be thrust with sufficient publicity upon 
the women's literary clubs, and parish meeting-houses, to en- 
snare the uneasy wearers of the academic crown. Give them 
time and they will be found praising a translated French poet 
for precisely those qualities which offend them in the proteges 
of Miss Harriet Monroe. The young Englishman, Rupert 
Brooke, might have contributed to " Poetry " for ten years 
without securing any more recognition than did the American, 
Robert Frost. But now both reputations, made in England, 
are widely accepted, and the inevitable professor is found to 
tread respectfully where Henry James rushed in. Compare 
the critical essays which James wrote during a period of thirty 
years with the stereotyped Bostonian theses of the men he 
left behind him. Yet nobody will accuse James of a disre- 
gard for tradition. 

The American word " standpatter " is curiously precise as 
a designation of the species. The conservative critic in 
Europe, Brunetiere, for example, is never so purely negative as 
his counterpart on this side of the Atlantic. When Brunetiere 
adversely criticized the Symbolist movement in French poetry 
he did so intelligently, not in that laboriously facetious fashion 
which is affected by the Stuart Shermans and W. H. Boyntons 
when they are moved to discuss les jeunes. Brunetiere, in a 
word, was a man of education and culture, capable of defend- 
ing rationally his own theories, without suggesting that the 
unfamiliar was necessarily bad. He condemned the excesses 
of the new school, not the school itself. If he had been in 
America, he would have denied the Symbolists even the right 



504 CIVILIZATION 

to exist. Edward Dowden might also be cited as a similar 
example, in English literature, of enlightened conservatism, 
Dowden was partly responsible for bringing Whitman to the 
favourable notice of the English public, and his work stands 
as a proof that respect for the classics does not involve hos- 
tility to the moderns. Just as he was able to write a master- 
piece of Shakespearean criticism without retiring into her- 
mitage, so he was qualified to appreciate original genius when 
it presented itself. He was not paralyzed, in short, by the 
weight of his literary traditions and conventions. 

A thousand and one reasons have been advanced to explain 
the absence of a genuine American literature, and all of them 
are probably true. The country is comparatively young, and 
its energies have been, are still, directed chiefly towards the 
exploitation of material resources and the conquest of natural 
difficulties. Racially the nation is in an embryonic stage, and 
until some homogeneity is attained the creation of a native 
tradition must be slow. Moreover, the conflict of diverse races 
implies, in a broad sense, the clash of two or more civiliza- 
tions, one of which must impose its culture if any organized 
progress is to be made. The language of the Hyphenated 
States is English, but to what extent will the nation in being 
evolve in accordance with this linguistic impulse? Will it be 
Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, Latin, or Slav? These are a few of 
the problems which have a direct bearing upon the intellec- 
tual development of the country. They must be solved be- 
fore America can give her imprint to the arts. They cannot 
be solved by the assumption that the Anglo-Saxon hyphen is 
alone authentic. The permanent h5^othesis of Colonialism 
must be abandoned, if " Americanization " is ever to be more 
than the silliest political cant. Puritanism must be confined 
to the conventicles, to its natural habitat. It must not be 
allowed to masquerade as art, philosophy, and statesmanship. 
The evangelical tyranny exists elsewhere, but only in America 
has it invaded every branch of the national life. In the more 
impatient and realistic generation which has emerged from the 
world war this monstrous extension of prohibitions is arousing 
a violent reaction. It is rare now to find a young American 
who does not cry out against American civilization. 



AS AN IRISHMAN SEES IT 505 

To the disinterested European, this spectacle is an affecting 
illustration of what may be called the enchantment of distance. 
Evidently these disconsolate citizens imagine that there is a 
way of escape from the Presbyterian wilderness, an oasis in 
the desert of one hundred per cent. Americanism, where every 
prospect pleases and man is only relatively vile. One listens 
to the intelligentsia, rendered more than usually loquacious by 
generous potations of unconstitutional Scotch whiskey, cursing 
the subtle blow to the arts administered by the Volstead denial 
of the necessary ambrosia. Advanced thinkers revelling in 
the delights of a well-organized polygamy, have taken me aside 
to explain how the prophets of Methodism have laid waste 
this fair land. I have read desperate appeals to all young 
men of spirit to shake off the yoke of evangelistic philistinism 
by expatriation to more urbane centres of culture. 

These are brave words, coming as they do, for the most part, 
from those who are in no wise incommoded by the ukases of 
the gospel-tent tyrants, and who have taken appropriate meas- 
ures to defeat the Eighteenth Amendment. Back of all their 
plaints is the superstition that Europe is free from the blight 
which makes America intolerable in their eyes. They do not 
know that the war has almost destroyed the Europe of a 
civilized man's affections. Socially, politically, and intellec- 
tually that distracted continent is rapidly expiring in the arms 
of profiteers and class-conscious proletarians, who have decided 
between them to leave not a blade of culture upstanding. The 
leisured class, which was rarely the wealthiest, is being ground 
out of existence by the plutocracy and the proletariat. That 
was the class which made the old Europe possible, yet there 
are Americans who go on talking as if its extinction did not 
knock the bottom out of their Utopia. Most of these dis- 
gruntled Americans are radicals, who strive to forward the 
designs of the plain people and their advocates. 

Yet, every European knows that if prohibition is making 
the headway it surely is, the chief reason must be sought in the 
growth of radicalism. From Bernard Shaw to Trotsky, our 
revolutionaries are " dry." Their avowed ideal is a state of so- 
ciety in which the allurements of love are reduced to a eugenic 
operation, the mellowing influences of liquor are abolished. 



5o6 CIVILIZATION 

and compulsory labour on the Taylor efficiency plan of scien- 
tific management is substituted. In fine, by the benign work- 
ings of democratic progress Europe is moving steadily toward 
the state of affairs attributed here by disillusioned intellectuals 
to the sinister machinations of Wall Street and the evangelists. 

No doubt America was a purer and happier place in 1620 
than in 1920. No Sumner was needed to keep the eyes of the 
settlers from the dimpled knees of Ziegfeld's beauties, and the 
platitudes of the Wilsonian epoch were the brightest flowers of 
wisdom in 1776. Alas! that it should be so, and in every 
country of our Western World. If the Magna Charta were 
to be offered for signature in London now, some nasty Bol- 
shevik would be sure to prove that the document was drawn 
up in a private conclave of the iqternational financiers. If 
Lincoln were to make his Gettysburg speech to-day the world 
would snicker irreverently, and a dreadfully superior person, 
with a Cambridge accent (like John Maynard Keynes, C.B.), 
would publish the " Economic Consequences of the Civil War," 
full of sardonic gibes at the innocent evangelism of Spring- 
field. As for the Declaration of Independence — well, during 
" the late unpleasantness " we saw what happened to such un- 
American sedition-mongers. In fine, things are not what they 
used to be; we pine for what is not, and so forth. Of this only 
we may be sure, that America corresponds neither more nor 
less than any other country to the dreams of its ancestors. 

Indeed, to be more affirmative in this plea for America, it is 
probable that this country has followed more closely the inten- 
tions of its founders than the critics will admit. Unlike most 
European nations, the Americans have preserved, with an al- 
most incomprehensible reverence, the constitution laid down 
to meet conditions entirely unlike those of the 20th century. 
Ancestor worship is the cardinal virtue of America and sur- 
passes that of China and Japan, where revolutionary changes 
have been made in the whole social and political structure. 
America was created as a political democracy for the benefit 
of staunch individualists, and both these ends have been 
achieved to perfection. Everything against which the super- 
sensitive revolt has come about planmaessig, and existed in the 
germ from the day when the Pilgrim Fathers first brought the 



AS AN IRISHMAN SEES IT 507 

blessings of Anglo-Saxon civilization to the shores of Cape 
Cod. 

In the South alone were traces of a Weltanschauung which 
might have given an impulse in another direction, but the 
South went under, in obedience to the rules of democratic Dar- 
winism. Once the dissatisfied American can bring himself to 
look the facts of his own history and of contemporary Europe 
in the face, he may be forced to relent. He will grant, at 
least, that it is useless to cherish the notion that the ills the 
American mind is heir to are spared to other peoples. He may 
even come to recognize the positive virtues of this country, 
where the stories in the Saturday Evening Post actually come 
true. Here a man can look his neighbour straight in the eye 
and subscribe — without a smile — to the romantic credo that 
all men are equal, in so far as it is possible by energy, hard 
work, and regular attendance at divine service, to reach the 
highest post in any career. Class barriers are almost unknown, 
and on all sides there is an endlessly generous desire to learn, 
to help, and to encourage. The traditional boy can still arrive 
from the slums of Europe and iinish up in the editorial chair of 
a wealthy newspaper. If he ever fails to do so it can only be 
because he starts by reading the Liberator, and devotes to the 
deciphering of Thorstein Veblen's hieroglyphics of socialism 
the time which should have been given to mastering the more 
profitable technique of Americanism. 

Ernest Boyd 



III. AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT 

IN a typical form of primitive society, where institutions and 
ideals, collective representations and individual reactions, 
coincide, no distinction can be made between culture and civ- 
ilization. Every element of the practical culture is a spiritual 
symbol, and there is no other logic or reason than that which 
is made manifest by the structure and habits of the social 
group. Life is a religion, in the two meanings of the word, that 
of a binding together of men, and the deeper one — of gathering 
the manifold activities of the individual in one compact spirit- 
ual mass. The mythical concepts, which limit and integrate 
the data of experience, in a sphere which is neither purely 
imaginative nor purely intellectual, present to the individual 
mind as irresistibly as to the mind of the group, a world of 
complementary objects which are of the same stuff as the 
apprehended data. Thought — practical, aesthetic, ethical — is 
still undifferentiated, unindividualized, as if a collective mind 
were an active reality, a gigantic, obscure, coherent person- 
ality, entering into definite relations with a world homogeneous 
with itself. 

Such an abstract, ideal scheme of the life of the human 
spirit before it has any history, before it is even capable of 
history, affords, in its hypothetical indistinction (within the 
group, within the individual), a prefiguration of a certain 
higher relationship of culture with civilization, of a humana 
civilitas, in which the practical should be related to the spir- 
itual, nature to the mind, in the full light of consciousness, 
with a perfect awareness of the processes of distinction and 
individualization. In the twilight and perspective of historical 
knowledge, if not in their actuality, Greece before Socrates, 
Rome before Christ, the Middle Ages before Saint Francis 
(each of them, before the apparition of the disrupting and 
illuminating element of growth), are successive attempts or 
etapes towards the creation of a civilization of such a kind — 
a human civilization. 

So8 



AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT 509 

Between these two limits — the primitive and the human — 
the ideal beginning and the ideal end — we can recognize, at 
any given moment in history, through the segmentation and 
aggregation of a multitude of cultures, different ages and strata 
of culture coexisting in the same social group; and the indi- 
vidual mind emerges at the confluence of the practical cul- 
tures, with science and philosophy and the ethical, non-tribal 
ideals, germs and initia of the human civilization remaining 
above the given society as a soul that never entirely vivifies 
its own body. History begins where first the distinction be- 
tween civilization and culture appears, or^ to state the same 
fact from a different angle, where individual consciousness is 
born. It ends, ideally, where the same distinction fades away 
into Utopia, or death, or the Kingdom of Heaven; where the 
highest form of individual consciousness is at no point higher 
than the consciousness of the group from which it originally 
differentiated itself. 

The writer of these pages belongs, by birth, education, and 
election, to the civilization of Rome and to the culture, or 
cultures, of Italy. The civilization of Rome, the latina 
civilitas, is a complex mind, whose successive phases of growth 
are the abstract humanism of ancient Greece, the civic and 
legal humanism of Rome, the moral and spiritual humanism 
of the Latin church, the aesthetic and metaphysical humanism 
of the Renaissance. Each phase is an integration of the pre- 
ceding one and the acquisition of a new universal principle, 
made independent of the particular social body in which it has 
partially realized itself before becoming a pure, intelligible 
ideal, an essential element of the human mind. The first three 
phases, Greece, Rome, and the Church, are still more or less 
closely associated, in relation to the forms of humanism which 
are peculiar to each of them, with particular cultures. But the 
last one, which, in its progress from the 13th century to 
our days, has been assimilating, purifying, and clarifying all 
the preceding ones, does not, at any given moment, directly 
connect itself with any definite social body. In its inception, 
as a purely Italian Renaissance, it may appear as the spiritual 
form of Italian society from the 13th to the 15th century; but 



510 CIVILIZATION 

its apparition coincides with the natural growth of the several, 
sharply defined European nationalities, and very soon (and 
apart from the evident insufficiency of any individual nation 
to fulfil its spiritual exigencies) it manifests its intrinsic char- 
acter of universality by overflowing the frontiers of Italy and 
becoming the law of the whole Western European world. 

The history of Europe during the last six centuries is the 
history of the gradual penetration of that idea within the circle 
of the passively or actively resistant, or inert, local, national 
cultures. The Reformation, of all active resistances, is the 
strongest and most important. The Germanic tribes rebel 
against the law of Rome, because a delay of from five to ten 
centuries in the experience of Christianity, and an experience 
of Christianity to be made not on a Graeco-Roman, but on an 
Odinic background, create in them the spiritual need of an 
independent elaboration of the same universal principles. Ger- 
many is practically untouched by the spirit of the Renaissance 
until the i8th century, and Italy herself is for two centuries 
reduced to spiritual and political servitude by the superior 
material strength which accompanies and sustains the spir- 
itual development of the nations of the North. Through the 
whole continent, within the single national units^ as well as 
between nation and nation, the contrast and collaboration of 
the Romanic and Germanic elements, of Renaissance and Re- 
formation, is the actual dialectic of the development of Euro- 
pean civilization: of the successive approximations of the sin- 
gle cultures, or groups of cultures, in a multitude of more or 
less divergent directions, with alternating accelerations and 
involutions, towards the common form, the humana civilitas. 

Of all the nations of Europe, Italy is the only one that, 
however contingently and imperfectly, has actually realized all 
of the four phases of humanism in a succession of historical 
cultures: Magna Grsecia, the Roman Empire, the Catholic 
Church, the Renaissance. And as each of these successive 
cultures was trying to embody in itself a universal, not a 
particular, principle, nationality in Italy is not, as for other 
nations, the acceptance of certain spiritual limits elaborated 
from within the social body, but a reaction to the pressure 



AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT 511 

of adjoining nationalities, which presented themselves as ob- 
stacles and impediments, even within the life of Italy herself, 
to the realization of a super-national principle. This is the 
process through which the humanism of the Renaissance, after 
having received its abstract political form at the hands of 
the thinkers and soldiers of the French Revolution, becomes 
active and militant in Mazzini's principle of nationality, which 
is a heroic effort towards the utilization of the natural growth 
of European nations for the purposes of a universal civiliza- 
tion. 

The distance between that civilization and the actual cul- 
tures of the nations of Europe can easily be measured by the 
observer of European events during the last seven years. To 
that civilization belong the ideals, to those cultures, the reali- 
ties, of the Great War. And all of us who have thought and 
fought in it have souls which are irremediably divided between 
that civilization and those cultures. If we should limit our- 
selves to the consideration of present facts and conditions, we 
might well give way to despair: not for a good many years 
in the past have nationalities been so impervious to the voice 
of the common spirit as they are in Europe to-day. And the 
sharp contrast between ideals and realities which has been 
made visible even to the blind by the consequences of the 
war, has engendered a temper of violence and cynicism even 
among those rare men and parties who succeeded in keeping 
their ideals au dessus de la melee, and therefore did not put 
them to the destructive test of a promise which had to be 
broken. 

The moral problem which every nation of Europe will have 
to labour at in the immediate future, is that of the relations 
of its historical culture or cultures with the exigencies of the 
humana civilitas. It is the problem that presents itself more 
or less dimly to the most earnest and thoughtful of Europeans, 
when they speak of the coming " death of our civilization," or 
of the " salvaging of civilization." To many of them, it is 
still a problem of institutions and technologies: its essentially 
spiritual quality does not seem to have been thoroughly 
grasped as yet. But it is also the problem that confronts, less 
tragically, with less urgency, but not less inevitably, this great 



512 CIVILIZATION 

European Commonwealth which has created its own life on 
the North American continent for the space of the last three 
centuries. 

This European Commonwealth of America owes its origin 
to a small number of adventurers and pilgrims, who brought 
the seeds of English culture to the new world. Let us very 
rapidly attempt a characterization of that original culture, 

England holds as peculiar and distinctive a position among 
the nations of Europe as Italy. She is the meeting-point of 
the Romanic and Germanic elements in European history; 
and if her culture may appear as belonging to the family of 
mediterranean cultures (to what we have called the latina 
civilitas), to an English Catholic, like Cardinal Newman, there 
was a time, and not very remote, when the Protestant could be 
proud of its Teutonic associations. From a Catholic and 
Franco-Norman mediaeval England, logically emerges, by a 
process similar to that exemplified by Italy and France and 
Spain, the England of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, of Shake- 
speare and the Cavaliers: Renaissance England. She flour- 
ishes between the suppression of the monasteries and the sup- 
pression of the theatres. She moulds, for all centuries to come, 
the aesthetic and political mind of the English people. But 
she carries the germs of a widely different culture in her womb: 
she borrows from them, already during the Elizabethan age, 
some traits that differentiate her from all other Renaissance 
cultures. And these germs, slowly gaining impetus through 
contrast and suppression, ultimately work her overthrow with 
the short-lived triumph of Cromwell and the Puritans. 

After 1688, the law of English life is a compromise be- 
tween Puritan and Cavalier, between Renaissance and Refor- 
mation, which sends the extreme representatives of each type 
out of the country, builders of an Empire of adventurers and 
pilgrims — while at home the moderate Cavalier, and the mod- 
erate Puritan, the Tory and the Whig, establish a Republic 
with a King, and a Parliamentary feudal regime. But the 
successive stages of English culture do not interest us at this 
point, except in so far as America has always remained closer 
to England than to any other European nation, and has again 



AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT 513 

and again relived in her own life the social, political, spiritual 
experiences of the Mother Country. 

It is from the two main directions of English spiritual life 
that America, through a double process of segmentation, Eliza- 
bethan or Cavalier in the South, Puritan in the North, draws 
the origins of her own life. It is in the Cavaher and the Puri- 
tan, still within the circle of English life, that the germs of 
American culture must be sought. The peculiar relations of 
the Cavalier and the Puritan to the general design of Euro- 
pean civiHzation define the original attitude of this Common- 
wealth beyond the sea towards the other European cultures, 
and are the origins of the curves which, modified in their 
development by the addition of new elements and by the action 
of a new, distinctive environment, American culture has de- 
scribed and will describe in the future. 

Puritanism is essentially a culture and not a civilization. 
The Puritan mind, in its quest for an original Christian experi- 
ence, falls upon the Old Testament and the Ancient Law. The 
God of the tribes of Israel becomes its God, a God finding a 
complete expression in the law that rules his chosen people. A 
compact, immovable spiritual logic, a set of fixed standards, a 
rhetoric of the virtues, the identification of any element of 
growth and change with the power of evil, a dualistic morality, 
and the consequent negation of a spiritually free will, these 
are the characteristics of Puritanism, constituting at the 
same time, and with the same elements, a system of truth and 
a system of conduct. In both the meanings in which we have 
used the word religion at the beginning of this essay, Puri- 
tanism is a perfect, final religion. Transplanted to America 
when Europe was slowly becoming conscious of the metaphysi- 
cal implications of the destruction of the old Cosmology — 
when the discovery of an infinite universe was depriving a 
purely transcendent divinity of the place it had been given 
beyond the limits of a finite universe — the infinite universe 
itself being manifest, in the words of Bruno, as lo specchio delta 
infinita delta, — it gave birth to an intrinsically static culture, 
standing out against a background of transcendental thought. 

The principles of growth in Puritanism were not specifically 



514 CIVILIZATION 

Puritan: they were those universal values that Puritan disci- 
pline succeeded in rediscovering because every moral discipline, 
however fettered by its premises, will inevitably be led towards 
them. Quite recently, a sincere and ardent apologist of Puri- 
tanism recognized in a document which he considers as the 
highest expression of that culture in America, a paraphrase of 
the Roman dulce et decorum. The irrationality which breaks 
through the most hermetically closed system of logic, in the 
process of life^ asserts itself by extracting from a narrowly 
institutional religion values which are not dependent upon a 
particular set of institutions, nor are valid for one people only. 
But we might detect the germs of that irrationality already in 
the very beginnings of the system, when Milton adds the whole 
weight of the Roman tradition to the Puritan conception of 
democracy — or in the divine words of the Gospels, through 
which in all times and places every anima naturaliter Christiana 
will hear the cry of Love rebelling against the letter of the 
Ancient Law. 

What the Cavalier brought to America, we should have to 
investigate only if we were tracing the history of divergent 
directions, of local cultures: because the original soul of Amer- 
ica is undoubtedly the Puritanic soul of New England, and 
the South, even before the War of Secession, in relation to the 
main direction, to the general culture, has a merely episodical 
significance. Yet, though the founders of New England were 
only Puritans, certain traits of the Cavalier spirit, the adven- 
turer in the pilgrim, will inevitably reappear in their descend- 
ants, repeating the original dichotomy in the generations issu- 
ing from an apparently pure stock: partly, because a dif- 
ference in beliefs is not always the mark of a fundamental 
difference in temperaments, and partly because those traits 
correspond to some of the generally human impulses sup- 
pressed by the choice of the Puritan. 

There is one element which is common to Puritan and 
Cavalier in America, and which cannot be said to belong in 
precisely the same fashion to their ancestors in England. It 
is, in England and the rest of Europe, a mythology formed 
by similar hopes and desires, by a similar necessity of giving 
an imaginary body to certain thoughts and aspirations, on the 



AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT 515 

part of the spirit of the Renaissance as well as of the spirit 
of the Reformation: a mythology which, in the mind of the 
European during the centuries between the discovery of Amer- 
ica and the French Revolution, inhabits such regions as the 
island of Utopia, the city of the Sun, and the continent of 
America. In that mythology, Utopism and American exotic- 
ism coincide. But the adventurer and the pilgrim were actu- 
ally and firmly setting their feet on one of the lands mapped 
in that purely ideal geography, and thoughts and aspirations 
confined by the European to the continent of dreams, became 
the moral exigencies of the new Commonwealth. Thus Amer- 
ica set herself against Europe as the ideal against the real, 
the land of the free, and the refuge of the oppressed; and was 
confirmed in such a position by her natural opportunities, by 
the conditions of pioneer life, by contrast to European des- 
potism — finally, by the Revolution and the Constitution, in 
which she felt that the initial moral exigencies were ultimately 
fulfilled. It is to this myth of a Promised Land, which is 
neither strictly Puritan nor strictly Cavalier, and yet at times 
seems to coincide with the less static aspects of Puritanism, 
that a peculiarly American idealism, unconquerable by defeat 
and even by the evidence of facts, abstract, self-confident, ener- 
getic, youthful and optimistic, owes its strength and its cour- 
age: an idealism which is hardly conscious of what Europe 
has been taught by centuries of dire experience — the irrepa- 
rable contingency and imperfection of history; and which be- 
lieves, as firmly as the Puritan legislator believes it, that such 
institutions have been devised, or can be devised, through which 
the ideal law, when thought out and written, will not fail to 
become the law of reality for all times to come. 

From two contrasting elements, a firm belief in a Law which 
was at the beginning, and a romantic mythology, a third char- 
acteristic of the American mind is thus engendered : a full con- 
fidence in the power of intellect conceived as a mechanism apt 
to contrive practical schemes for the accomplishment of ideal 
ends. This intellectual faith is similar in its static nature to 
the moral faith of the Puritan: it is the material weapon of 
Puritanism. Perfectibility is within its reach, but not the 
actual processes of evolution. The intellect that does not con- 



5i6 CIVILIZATION 

ceive itself as a process or function, but as a mechanism, can 
tend towards, and theoretically possess, a state of perfection, 
but will resent and condemn the gropings and failings of actual, 
imperfect growth and change. Not without reason, the great- 
est individual tragedy of the war, in a t3^ically American 
mind confronted with the sins and misery of Europe, was a 
tragedy of intellectual pride: of the inability of a static intel- 
lect to become charitably active in the tragic flux of European 
life; a tragedy which a little moral and intellectual humility 
might well have spared to the generous hopes of America, 
and the childish, messianic faith which irradiated for only too 
short a time the bleeding soul of Europe. 

If we have called Puritanism a culture, what name shall we 
reserve for that vast and complicated collection of mechanical 
contrivances which constitute the material body of American 
society to-day? We are in the presence of a technology, a 
more highly developed one, perhaps (with the possible excep- 
tion of Germany before the war), than any that has ever ex- 
isted in the world. Technologies have a logic of their own, and 
that logic is apt to take the place of higher spiritual construc- 
tions; either when conditions of life lend a miraculous char- 
acter to the means of sustaining life itself and invest the prac- 
tical actions of hunting or agriculture with a religious signifi- 
cance; or when the complexity of their organization is such 
that the workings of that practical logic inevitably transcend 
the power of observation of the individual agent, however 
highly placed in the machinery itself, and moral or intellectual 
myths are born of an imperfect knowledge. This is the case 
of America, and in America this technological or industrial 
mythology has crushed out of existence the rival myths of the 
farms and the prairie, allowing them a purely romantic value 
and decorative function, through the industrially controlled 
power of the press. Even pioneering, and the conquest of 
the West, a process in which Americans of another age found 
an energetic, if partly vicarious, satisfaction for certain moral 
and ideal yearnings, has receded, in the mind of Americans of 
to-day, into the shades of a fabulous and solemn background. 

The industrial revolution followed in America the lines of 



AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT 517 

development of its early English model. This commonwealth 
beyond the sea, agricultural and democratic, found in itself the 
same elements which gave birth in the original country to an 
industrial feudalism, grafting itself, without any solution of 
continuity, on a feudalism of the land. The ineradicable 
optimism of the American invested the whole process with 
the same halo of moral romance which had coloured the age 
of pioneering, and accepted as a useful substitute (or rather, as 
a new content) for Puritanic moralism the philosophy of oppor- 
tunity and of success constantly commensurate with true merit. 
The conception of intellect as a mechanism to be used for 
moral and ideal ends, gave way to a similar though more com- 
plex conception, modelled not on the methods of pure science, 
from whose early conquests the revolution itself had been 
started, but on those of applied science or of practical ma- 
chinery. 

When, in the natural course of events, the bonds which 
kept together the purely economic elements of the country 
became more powerful and real than any system of political 
institutions, when, in fact, a financial syndicalism became the 
structure underlying the apparent organs of government, all 
the original ideals of America had already gathered to the 
defence of the new order. Hence the extraordinary solidity of 
the prevailing economic system in this country, when com- 
pared with any European country. Economic, as well as po- 
litical systems, ultimately rest on convictions rather than on 
sheer force, and the radical in America, in all spheres of 
thought, is constantly in the necessity of fighting not mere 
institutions, as in Europe, but institutionalized ideals, organ- 
isms and personalities which establish their right on the same 
assumptions which prompt him in his rebellion. There is less 
difference in fundamentals between a Carnegie and a Debs 
than between any two individuals placed in similar positions 
in Europe. 

An interesting by-product of this particular development is 
the myth of the captain of industry, possessed, in the popular 
imagination, of all the virtues. And a consequence of this 
myth is an unavoidable revision of the catalogue of virtues, 
from which some were expunged that do not lead to industrial 



5i8 CIVILIZATION 

success, and others were admitted because industrial success 
is thought to be impossible without them. This myth is not 
believed in by the aspiring multitudes only, but by a good 
many among the captains of industry themselves, who accept 
their wealth as a social trust, and conceive of their function in 
a manner not dissimilar from that of the old sovereign by the 
grace of God. 

This transposition of ideals from the religious and moral 
field to the practical and economic, leaves only a very thin 
ground for personal piety and the religion of the Churches. 
Yet there is no country in the world (again, with the only pos- 
sible exception of Northern Africa during the first centuries of 
the Christian Era) which has produced such a wealth and such 
a variety of religious movements as America. The substance 
of that very thin ground is diluted Puritanism, Puritanism 
which, in a vast majority of the population, converts itself, 
strangely enough, as we have seen, into social optimism, a 
belief sufficient to the great active masses, but not to the needs 
of " the heart," when the heart is given enough leisure to con- 
sider itself, through either too much wealth or too little hope: 
through the discovery of its emptiness, when the possession of 
the means makes manifest the absence of an end, or through 
the spasms of its hunger, when means are beyond reach, in 
the hands of the supposed inferior and unworthy. In this 
second case, even a purely sensual craving dignifies itself with 
the name of the Spirit. The more or less official Churches, 
in an attempt to retain the allegiance of their vast congrega- 
tions, have followed the masses in their evolution: they pride 
themselves essentially on their social achievements, a little 
doubtfully, perhaps, knowing that their particular God has 
no more reason to inhabit a church than a factory, and that 
the highest possible embodiment of their doctrine is an orderly 
and paternally governed industrial organization. 

To the needs of " the heart " minister the innumerable sects 
(and here again, the American religious history repeats, in mag- 
nified proportions, the characteristics of English religious life). 
But because of the gradual impoverishment of the central reli- 
gious tradition of the country, because of the scanty cultural 



AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT $^9 

background of both apostles and neophytes, it is hard to recog- 
nize in the whole movement an intimate spiritual dialectic 
which might lend strength and significance to the individual 
sects. A vague mysticism appropriates to itself, in a haphaz- 
ard and capricious fashion, shadows and ghosts of religious 
experiences and opinions, whose germs of truth lie in other 
ages and other climates. The only common feature seems to 
be a distrust of intellect, derived from the original divorce of 
the intellectual from the spiritual in the Puritan, a distrust 
which at times becomes active in the denunciation of the sup- 
posed crimes of science. It is this fundamental common fea- 
ture which will for ever prevent any of them from becoming 
what all '^ects fail to be, a religion. 

The two states of mind which are nearer to-day to being 
true religions are, on one side, Americanism (a religion as a 
common bond), and on the other. Radicalism (a religion as 
a personal experience). Americanism is the more or less per- 
fect expression of the common belief that American ideals 
realize themselves in American society. Radicalism is the 
more, or less spasmodic protest against such a belief, sometimes 
coupled with an individual attempt at realizing those ideals in 
one's life and actions. The sharpest contrast between the two 
attitudes is to be found in their ideas of political and spiritual 
freedom; which to one is a condition actually existing by the 
mere fact of the existence of American society such as it is, 
and to the other a dynamic principle which can never be per- 
manently associated with any particular set of institutions. 

The original spirit of Puritanism can hardly be said to be 
alive to-day in America. In a few intellectuals, it confuses 
itself with other high forms of moral discipline in the past, 
and reappears with a strange fidelity to form rather than sub- 
stance, as Platonism, Classicism, Mediaevalism, Catholicism, or 
any other set of fixed standards that can be accepted as a 
whole, and can give the soul that sense of security which is 
inherent in the illusion of possessing the final truth. The conse- 
quence of such a deviation is that these truly religious souls, 
after having satisfied themselves with a sufficiently vast and 
beautiful interpretation of their creed, resent any cruder and 
more dangerous form of intellectual experience much more 



520 CIVILIZATION 

keenly than they resent crudities and dangers actually present 
in the nature of things. They are intellectuals^ but again, with 
no faith in intellect; they are truly isolated among their fellow- 
countrymen, and yet they believe in conformity, and assume 
the conformity of American society to be the conformity of 
their dreams. 

Such a static apprehension of truth, such an identification 
of universal spiritual values with one or another particular 
tradition, is in fact as much an obstacle to the new life of 
the human spirit as the external conformity enforced by social 
optimism. But the polemic against the older intellectuals is 
carried on by younger men, many of them of recent immigrant 
blood, but all of them reared in the atmosphere of American 
culture, and who differ from them more in the objects of their 
preference than in the vastness or depth of their outlook. 
There is a way of clinging to the latest fashion in philosophy or 
in art which is not a progress in any sense in relation to older 
faiths; of combating a manifest logical fallacy by the use of 
the same sophism; of embracing sin with the same moral en- 
thusiasm that in less enlightened times was kept in reserve for 
the highest virtues only. 

More important, for their influence on certain phases of 
American life, than these intellectual echoes, are the moralistic 
remnants of Puritanism. It is always possible, for small 
groups of people, strongly endowed with the sense of other 
people's duties, to intimidate large sections of public opinion 
into accepting the logical consequences of certain undisputed 
moral assumptions, however widely they may differ from the 
realities of American life. It is under such circumstances that 
the kind-hearted, easy-going American pays the penalty for 
his identification of realities with ideals, by being deprived of 
some very dear reality in the name of an ideal which had 
long since ceased to have any meaning for him. 

From whatever side we look at American culture, we are 
constantly brought face to face with a disregard or distrust, 
or a narrow conception, of purely intellectual values, which 
seems to be the common characteristic of widely divergent 
spiritual attitudes. The American does not, as the English- 



AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT 521 

man, glory in his capacity for muddling through: he is proud 
of certain logical achievements, and has a fondness for ab- 
stract schemes, an earnest belief in their validity and effi- 
ciency; but no more than the English does he believe that 
intellect is an integral part of the human personality. He 
recognizes the identity of goodness and truth, provided that 
truth can be found out by other means than purely intellec- 
tual: by common sense, by revelation, by instinct, by imagina- 
tion, but not by intellect. It is here that even the defenders, 
among Americans, of the classical tradition miss the true mean- 
ing of the message of Socrates and Plato, the foundation of 
humanism. 

What is peculiarly American in the opinions of American 
philosophers is a clear and distinct expression of the common 
attitude. The official philosophy of America has repeated for 
a century the views of English empiricists and of German ideal- 
ists, sometimes with very interesting and illuminating personal 
variations. It has even, and it is an original achievement, 
brought them to lose their peculiar accents and to coincide in 
new theories of knowledge. But the heart of American phi- 
losophy is not there: it is in pragmatism, in instrumentalism, 
in whatever other theory clearly establishes the purely func- 
tional character of truth, the mechanical aspect of intellect. 
Having put the criterion of truth outside the intellect, and 
considered intellect as the mere mechanism of belief, these 
doctrines try to re-establish the dignity of intellect by making 
of it a machine for the reproduction of morally or socially 
useful beliefs. The operation is similar to that of an anatomist 
who, having extracted the heart from a living body, would pre- 
sume to reconstruct the body by artificially promoting the 
movements of the heart. The doctrine of the purely pragmatic 
or instrumental nature of intellect, which is the logical clarifi- 
cation of the popular conception, is a doctrine of radical scep- 
ticism, whatever the particular declarations of faith of the 
philosophers themselves might say to the contrary: it destroys 
not the objects of knowledge only, but the instrument itself. 

American philosophers came to this doctrine through the 
psychological and sociological approach to the problems of 
the mind. Such an approach is in keeping with the general 



522 CIVILIZATION 

tendency towards assuming the form of natural and mathe- 
matical sciences, which moral sciences in American universities 
have been obeying during the last thirty or forty years, partly 
under the influence of a certain kind of European positivism, 
and partly because of the prestige that natural and mathe- 
matical sciences gained from their practical applications. 
Even now it is easier to find a truly humanistic mind, a sound 
conception of intellectual values, among the great American 
scientists than among the philosophers and philologists: but 
pure science has become the most solitary of occupations, and 
the scientist the most remote of men, since his place in society 
has been taken by th' inventor and by the popularizer. Psy- 
chology and sociology, those half-literary, half-scientific dis- 
ciplines, gave as a basis to philosophy not the individual effort 
to understand and to think, but the positive observation of the 
more or less involuntary processes of thought in the multitude. 
Intellect was sacrificed to a democratic idea of the equality of 
minds: how could the philosopher presume to think, I do not 
say better or more efficiently than, but differently from the 
multitude? To European philosophy the reproach has been 
made again and again, and with some justice, of imposing laws 
upon reality which are only the laws of individual philosophic 
thought; and yet what else does the scientist ultimately do? 
But both scientist and philosopher find their justification in 
their faith in the validity of their instruments: in a spirit of 
devotion and humility, not in a gratuitous presumption. The 
typical American philosopher has sold his birthright, not for 
a pottage of lentils, but for mere love. 

I am painfully aware of the fact that, through the meshes 
of this necessarily abstract and sketchy analysis, a good deal 
of the beauty and vastness, the vigour and good-humour of 
American life inevitably escapes. The traveller from the old 
countries experiences here a sense of great spaces and of prac- 
tically unbounded possibilities, which reflects itself in an un- 
paralleled gaiety and openness of heart, and freedom of social 
intercourse. The true meaning of the doctrine of opportunity 
lies much more in these individual attitudes than in any dif- 
ference between the structures of American and European 



AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT 523 

societies. And I do not believe that the only explanation for 
them is in the prosperity of America when compared to the 
misery of Europe, because this generosity stands in no direct 
relation with individual wealth. The lumberman and the long- 
shoreman are as good as, if not better than, the millionaire. 

These individual attitudes find their collective expression 
in the idea of, and readiness for, service, which is universal 
in this country. Churches, political parties, movements for 
social reform, fraternal orders, industrial and business organi- 
zations, meet on this common ground. There is no material 
interest or spiritual prejudice that will not yield to an appeal 
for service: and whenever the object of service is clearly 
defined, action follows the impulse, intolerant of any delay. 
But Service is a means and not an end: you can serve a God, 
or a man, or a group of men, and in that man or group of men 
what you conceive to be his or their need, but you cannot serve 
Service. And the common end can only be given by a clear 
intellectual vision of the relations between a set of ideals and 
the realities of life. 

This intrinsic generosity of the American people is the mo- 
tive of the song, and the substance of the ideal, of the one great 
poet that America has added to the small family of European 
poets: Walt Whitman. In him that feeling and that impulse 
became a vision and a prophecy. There is a habit on the 
part of American intellectuals to look with a slight contempt 
on the admiration of Europeans for the poetry of Walt Whit- 
man, as just another symptom of their ignorance of American 
things. But I, for one, will confess that what I have loved 
passionately, as little more than a boy, in that poetry, is that 
same quality whose presence I have now recognized as the 
human flower of American culture, and which makes me love 
this country as passionately as I loved that poetry. 

It is one of the many paradoxes of American intellectual 
life that even the cultural preparation of a Walt Whitman 
should have been deeper and more substantial, if not more 
systematic, than that of any professor or writer of his times. 
These were minds which had as fully imbibed European 
thought and imagination as any professor or writer in Europe: 
but that thought, that imagination, transplanted to tlie new 



524 CIVILIZATION 

country, stood in no real relation with the new practical and 
moral surroundings, and were therefore thin and sterile. Walt 
Whitman knew and understood the great traditions of Euro- 
pean civilization, and tried to express them in the original 
idiom, moral and literary, of his America. 

But nemo propheta, and it takes centuries to understand a 
poet. Walt Whitman still waits for his own generation. The 
modern schools of American poetry, curious of all winds of 
fashion, working for the day rather than for the times, have 
not yet fully grasped, I do not say the spirit of his message, 
but even, for all their free-versifying, the mystery of his mag- 
nificent rhythms. His successors are rather among some of 
the younger novehsts, and in a few men, spiritually related to 
them, who approach the study of American conditions from 
a combined economic and psychological point of view. The 
novelists are busy in discovering the actual traits of the Ameri- 
can physiognomy, with sufficient faith in the future to describe 
the shades with as much care as the lights, and with a deeper 
passion; the economists are making way for the highest and 
purest American ideals by revealing the contingent and merely 
psychological basis of the supposedly scientific axioms of clas- 
sical economics. 

My own experience of American life, between the autumn 
of 1 919 and the summer of 192 1, has brought me in contact 
with all sorts and manners of people from one end to the other 
of the country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is from 
this direct intercourse with Americans, rather than from my 
readings of American literature, continued for a much longer 
time, that I have formed the opinions expressed in this paper. 
But as my work has brought me in closer communion with col- 
leges and universities than with any other kind of institutions, 
I feel a little more assured in writing of the educational aspect 
of the American problem. 

A university is in any case more a unhersitas studentium 
than a corporation of professors. I have enjoyed my life in 
American faculties, and I have gained a good deal from the 
many noble souls and intellects that I have met among them; 
but, whenever it has been possible to me, I have escaped from 



AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT 525 

the faculties to the students and tried to understand the tend- 
encies of the coming generations. 

The students of the American college or university, from the 
comparatively ancient institutions of the East, to the young 
co-educational schools of the Middle and Far West, form a 
fairly homogeneous, though very widely representative, cross- 
section of the American community. They are, in a very pre- 
cise and inclusive meaning, young America, the America of to- 
morrow. A good many of their intellectual and spiritual char- 
acteristics are the common traits of American culture which 
we have studied in the preceding paragraphs; and yet, be- 
cause of the social separation of individuals according to ages, 
which is carried in this country much farther than in any 
European country, they develop also a number of independent 
traits, which are peculiar to each one of the " younger genera- 
tions " in their turn. The life of the American boy or girl, 
up to the time of their entrance into college, is mainly the life 
of a beautiful and healthy young organism, not subject to any 
too strict intellectual or spiritual discipline. The High Schools 
seem to understand their function in a spirit which is substan- 
tially different from that of the European secondary schools, 
owing especially to certain prevailing educational doctrines 
founded on a fiction which is used also in many other fields 
of American life, but which in the field of education has 
wrought more harm than in any other one, the fiction of the 
public demand — in this particular case of one or another type 
of education. A fiction undoubtedly it is^ and used to give 
prestige and authority to the theories of individual educational- 
ists, since in no country and in no time there have existed 
educational opinions outside the circle of the educators them- 
selves. But this fiction has unfortunately had practical con- 
sequences because American educators, subject to big business 
in the private institutions, and to the politicians in the State 
schools and universities, have not found in themselves the 
energy, except in a few isolated instances, to resist what came 
to them strengthened by such auspices. And the public itself 
was easily convinced that it wanted what it was told that it 
wanted. The students, more sinned against than sinning, 
enjoy the easy atmosphere of the school, and it is only when 



526 CIVILIZATION 

they reach college that they become aware of their absolute 
unpreparedness for the higher studies. 

This consciousness of their inferiority manifests itself in an 
attitude of " low-browism," which is not contempt of that 
which they think is beyond them, but rather an unwillingness 
to pretend that they are what they know they are not. It is 
practically impossible for them to acquire any standards in 
matters of scholarship, and they are thus forcibly thrown back 
on that which they know very well, the sports, and social life 
among themselves. A Chinese friend of mine once quaintly 
defined an American university as an athletic association in 
which certain opportunities for study were provided for the 
feeble-bodied. Now, in athletics and social life, the student 
finds something that is real, and therefore is an education: there 
is no pretence or fraud about football, and in their institutions 
within the college and the university the students obey certain 
standards and rules which are not as clearly justified as those 
of athletics, but still are made by themselves, and therefore 
readily understood. They are standards and rules that some- 
times strangely resemble those of primitive society, as it is 
only too natural when the ground on which they grow is a 
community of the very young only, and yet undoubtedly they 
are a preparation for a life after college in which similar fea- 
tures are very far from being the exception. And besides, that 
social life has a freedom and beauty of its own, evident in one 
at least of its most hallowed institutions, the dance. Ameri- 
can dances, with those captivating and vital rhythms which 
American music has appropriated for itself from the Negro, 
are a perfect expression of the mere joy of life. The older 
generations are shocked and mystified by these dances, and 
also by many other ways and by the implicit opinions of the 
young; but so they have been in all ages and countries. To 
a curious and passionate observer, the youth of America seems 
to be obscurely labouring at a liberation of the sexual life 
from pretences and unjustified inhibitions, and, through an 
original experience of the elements of love, at a creation of new 
values, perhaps of a new morality. 

But the student is an object of perplexity and wonder to 
the professor, who generally ends by taking very seriously, 



AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT 527 

very literally, as something that cannot be changed, his atti- 
tude towards athletics and the social life of the college. Start- 
ing from such an assumption, the professor becomes shy of 
teaching; that is, he keeps for himself whatever true intel- 
lectual and spiritual interests he may have, and deals out to 
the students in the classroom rations of knowledge, which go 
up to form a complicated system of units and credits sym- 
bolizing the process of education. There is, to my mind, no 
more tragic misunderstanding in American life. 

My own experience (and I give it for what it is worth) tells 
me that athletics and the social life are vicarious satisfactions 
for much deeper spiritual and intellectual needs. The student 
receives from the common American tradition a desire for spir- 
itual values; from his individual reaction to that tradition, 
a craving for intellectual clarity. But he is handicapped by 
his scholastic unpreparedness, and disillusioned by the aloof- 
ness of the professor, by the intricacies and aridity of the cur- 
riculum: by the fact, only too evident to him, that what he is 
given is not science or thought, but their scholastic version. 
Whenever a man stands before him, and without trying to 
" put himself at his level," talks to him as one talks to a man, 
thinking for him as one thinks for oneself, there is no more 
ready and enthusiastic response to be had than from the 
American student. He is not afraid of the difficulties or 
dangers, but he must trust his guide, and know that his guide 
trusts him. There is evidence for this in the cases which are 
too frequent to be called mere exceptions, of those American 
professors who are truly popular in the colleges and universi- 
ties. But until many more of them realize what splendid 
material is in their hands, what big thirst there is for them to 
quench, and go back to their work with this new faith, the 
gulf will not be bridged, and young America will have to at- 
tempt to solve her own problems without the help of the 
spiritual experience of the centuries. 

This condition in the institutions of higher learning is a sym- 
bol and a mirror of the condition of the country. With an 
impoverished religious tradition, with an imperfect knowledge 
of the power of intellect, America is starving for religious and 



52 8 CIVILIZATION 

intellectual truth. No other country in the world has, as the 
phrase goes, a heart more full of service: a heart that is con- 
stantly quaerens quern amet. With the war, and after the war, 
America has wished to dedicate herself to the world, and has 
only withdrawn from action when she has felt that she could 
not trust her leaders, what was supposed to be her mind. 

In a few years, the children of the recent millions of immi- 
grants from all regions of Europe will come forward in Ameri- 
can life and ask for their share in the common inheritance of 
American tradition, in the common work of American civiliza- 
tion. They will not have much to contribute directly from 
their original cultures, but they will add an unexampled va- 
riety of bloods, of intellectual and moral temperaments, to the 
population of America. Their Americanization, in habits and 
language and manners, is a natural process which, left to itself, 
invariably takes place in the second generation. America 
must clarify and intensify her tradition, the moral discipline 
of the Puritan, the moral enthusiasm of the Discoverers and 
Pioneers, for them, and they will gladly embrace her heritage; 
but this clarification and intensification is only possible 
through the revision of the original values in the light of the 
central humanistic tradition of European thought. 

The dreams of the European founders of this Common- 
wealth of Utopia may yet come true, in the way in which hu- 
man dreams come true, by becoming the active, all-pervading 
motive of spiritual effort, the substance of life. Exiles, volun- 
tary or forced, from England and Ireland, from Russia and 
Italy, from Germany and Israel, children of one mother, uni- 
fied in America as they will not be unified for centuries to come 
in Europe, will thus have a chance to anticipate, in the civilitas 
americana, the future developments of the humana civilitas. 

And if this generation needs a motto, I would suggest one 
line of Dante: 

luce intellettual plena d'amore: 

the light of intellect, in the fulness of love. 

Raffaello Piccoli 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

THE CITY 

There is no adequate literature of cities in America. Some of 
the larger cities possess guide-books and local histories; but the 
most valuable illuminations on the history and development of the 
American city lie buried in contemporary papers, narratives of 
travel, and speeches. The reader who wishes to explore the ground 
farther should dip into volumes and papers drawn from all periods. 
The recent editions of " Valentine's Manual " should be interesting 
to those who cannot consult the original " Manual of the Common 
Council of New York." During the last twenty years a great many 
reports and surveys have been printed, by city planning commissions 
and other bodies: these are valuable both for showing the limita- 
tions of the established regime and for giving hints of the forces 
that are working, more or less, for improvement. " The Pittsburgh 
Survey " (Russell Sage Foundation) is the great classic in this field. 
A compendious summary of American city developments during the 
last generation is contained in Charles Zueblin's " American 
Municipal Progress " (Macmillan). Standing by itself in this litera- 
ture is a very able book by Paul Harlan Douglass, called " The 
Little Town," published by Macmillan. (A book which shall deal 
similarly with the Great Town is badly needed.) The best 
general approach to the city is that of Professor Patrick Geddes in 
" Cities in Evolution " (Williams and Norgate. London.) Those 
who are acquainted with Professor Geddes's " A Study in City 
Development " or his contributions to " Sociological Papers " (Mac- 
millan, 1905, 1906, 1907) will perhaps note my debt to him: I 
hasten heartily to acknowledge this, as well as my debt, by personal 
intercourse, to his colleague, Mr. Victor V. Branford. If the lay 
reader can learn nothing else from Professor Geddes, he can learn 
the utility of throwing aside the curtains of second-hand knowledge 
and studying cities and social institutions by direct observation. 
The inadequacy of American civic literature will not be altogether 
a handicap if it forces the reader to obtain by personal explora- 
tions impressions which he would otherwise get through the blur of 
the printed page. Every city and its region is in a sense an exhibition 

531 



532 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

of natural and social history. Let the reader walk the streets of 
our cities, as through the halls of a museum, and use the books that 
have been suggested only as so many tickets and labels. Americans 
have a reputation in Europe as voracious sightseers. One wonders 
what might not happen if Americans started to see the sights at 
home — not the Grand Canyon and the Yosemite, but " Broadway," 
and its back alleys, and the slums and suburbs that stretch beyond. 
If observation led to criticism, and criticism to knowledge, where 
might not knowledge lead? L. M. 



POLITICS 

The standard works on the history of American politics are so 
well known (and so few) that they scarcely need mention. Bryce, 
Ostrogorski and de Tocqueville, I assume, have been read by all 
serious students, as have also such personal memoirs as those of 
Blaine and John Sherman. Bryce's work is a favourite, but it suffers 
from the disingenuousness of the man. Dr. Charles A. Beard's 
" Economic Interpretation of the Constitution " is less a complete 
treatise than a prospectus of a history that is yet to be written. 
As far as I know, the valuable suggestions in his preface have never 
inspired any investigation of political origins by other American 
historians, most of whom are simply unintelligent school-teachers, as 
their current " histories " of the late war well show. All such in- 
quiries are blocked by the timorousness and stupidity that are so 
characteristic of American scholarship. Our discussion of politics, 
like our discussion of economics, deals chiefly with superficialities. 
Both subjects need ventilation by psychologists not dependent upon 
college salaries, and hence free to speak. Certainly the influence of 
religious enthusiasm upon American politics deserves a careful study; 
nevertheless, I have never been able to find a book upon it. Again, 
there is the difficult question of the relations between politics and 
journalism. My belief is that the rising power of newspapers has 
tended to drive intelligent and self-respecting men out of politics, 
for the newspapers are chiefly operated by cads and no such man 
wants to be at their mercy. But that sort of thing is never studied 
in the United States. We even lack decent political biography, so 
common in England. The best light to be obtained upon current 
politics is in the Congressional Record. It costs $1.50 a month and 
is well worth it. Soon or late the truth gets into the Record; it 
even got there during the war. But it seldom gets into the news- 
papers and it never gets into books. H. L. M. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 533 

JOURNALISM 

I know of no quite satisfactory book on American journalism. 
" History of Journalism in the United States " by George Henry 
Payne and " History of American Journalism " by James Melvin 
Lee are fairly good in their treatment of the past, but neither of 
them shows any penetration in analyzing present conditions. The 
innocence of Mr. Payne may be judged by his opinion that the 
Kansas City Star, under Nelson, exemplifies a healthier kind of 
" reform journalism " than the Post under Godkin! " Liberty and 
the News " by Walter Lippmann is suggestive, but it does not pre- 
tend to contain any specific information. More specific in naming 
names and giving modern instances is a short essay by Hamilton 
Holt, " Commercialism and Journalism." " The Brass Check " by 
Upton Sinclair contains much valuable material, and perhaps what 
I have said of it does not do it justice; certainly it should be read 
by everybody interested in this subject. Will Irwin published in 
Collier's Weekly from January to July, 191 1, a valuable series of 
articles, " The American Newspaper: A Study of Journalism." I 
cannot find that these articles have been reprinted in book form. 
There is some information in autobiographies and biographies of 
important journalists, such as " Recollections of a Busy Life " by 
Horace Greeley, " Life of Whitelaw Reid " by Royal Cortissoz, 
" Life and Letters of E. L. Godkin " by Rollo Ogden, " Life of 
Charles A. Dana " by J. H. Wilson, " Life and Letters of John Hay " 
by William Roscoe Thayer, "An Adventure with Genius: Recol- 
lections of Joseph Pulitzer," by Alleyne Ireland; also "The Story 
of the Sun " by Frank M. O'Brien. Biographies, however, celebrate 
persons and only indirectly explain institutions. A useful bibliogra- 
phy, which includes books and magazine articles, is " Daily News- 
papers in U. S." by Wieder Callie of the Wisconsin University School 
of Journalism. But after all the best source of information is the 
daily newspaper, if one knows how to read it — and read between the 
lines. J. M. 



THE LAW 

" Bryce's Modern Democracies." Chapter XLIII, is a recent sur- 
vey of the American legal system; Raymond Fosdick, " American 
Police Systems," Chapter I, states the operation of criminal law. 
For legal proceedure, see Reginald Heber Smith, " Justice and the 



534 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

Poor," published by the Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement 
of Teaching and dealing with legal aid societies and other methods 
of securing more adequate legal relief; Charles W. Eliot and others, 
" Efficiency in the Administration of Justice," published by the Na- 
tional Economic League; Moorfield Storey, "The Reform of Legal 
Procedure;" and many other books and articles; the reports of the 
American and New York Bar Associations are of especial value, 
John H, Wigmore, "Evidence," vol. V (191 5 edition) discusses 
recent progress; see his "Cases on Torts, Preface," on substantive 
law. A very wide range of topics in American law, philosophical, 
historical, procedural, and substantive, is covered by the writings of 
Roscoe Pound, of which a list is given in " The Centennial History of 
the Harvard Law School." The same book deals with many phases 
of legal education; see also "The Case Method in American Law 
Schools," Josef Redlich, Carnegie Endowment. For the position 
of lawyers, the best book is, Charles Warren, " A History of the 
American Bar;" a recent discussion of their work is Simeon E. 
Baldwin, " The Young Man and the Law." No one interested in 
this field should fail to read the " Collected Legal Papers of Justice 
Holmes;" see also John H, Wigmore, "Justice Holmes and the Law 
of Torts " and Felix Frankfurter, " The Constitutional Opinions of 
Justice Holmes," both in the Harvard Law Review, April, 1916, 
and Roscoe Pound, " Judge Holmes's Contributions to the Science 
of Law," ibid., March, 1921. A valuable essay on Colonial legal 
history is Paul S. Reinsch, " English Common Law in the Early 
American Colonies." A mass of material will be found in the law 
reviews, which are indexed through 1907 by Jones, " Index to Legal 
Periodicals," 3 vols., and afterwards in the Law Library Journal, 
cumulative quarterly. Z. C, Jr., 



EDUCATION 

The ideas contained in the article are so commonplace and of such 
general acceptance among educators that it is impossible to give 
specific authority for them. In addition to the articles mentioned, 
one of the latest by Dr. D. S. Miller, " The Great College Illusion " 
in the New Republic for June 22, 192 1, should be referred to. For 
the rest the report of the Committee of Ten of the National Educa- 
tion Association, and the reports of President Eliot and President 
Lowell of Harvard, President Meiklejohn of Amherst, and President 
Wilson of Princeton, may be cited, with the recognition that any 
such selection is invidious. R. M. L. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 535 

SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM 

There has been no really fundamental discussion of American 
scholarship or American criticism. Those who merely seek a good 
historical sketch of our older literary scholarship, along conven- 
tional lines, will find one in the fourth volume of the " Cambridge 
History of American Literature " that is at all events vastly superior 
to the similar chapters in the " Cambridge History of English Litera- 
ture," But more illuminating than any formal treatise are the com- 
ments on our scholarly ideals and methods in Emerson's famous 
address on " The American Scholar," in " The Education of Henry 
Adams," and in the " Letters " of William James. The " Cambridge 
History of American Literature " contains no separate chapter on 
American criticism, and the treatment of individual critics is 
pathetically inadequate. The flavour of recent criticism may be 
savoured in Ludwig Lewisohn's interesting anthology, " A Modern 
Book of Criticism," where the most buoyant and " modern " of our 
younger men are set side by side with all their unacademic masters 
and compeers of the contemporary European world. All that can 
be said in favour of the faded moralism of the older American 
criticism is urged in an article on " The National Genius " in the 
Atlantic Monthly for January, 192 1, the temper of which may be 
judged from this typical excerpt: " When Mr. Spingarn declares that 
beauty is not concerned with truth or morals or democracy, he 
makes a philosophical distinction which I have no doubt that 
Charles the Second would have understood, approved, and could, 
at need, have illustrated. But he says what the American schoolboy 
knows to be false to the history of beauty in this country. Beauty, 
whether we like it or not, has a heart full of service." The case 
against the conservative and traditional type of criticism is pre- 
sented with slapdash pungency in the two volumes of H. L. 
Mencken's " Prejudices." But any one can make out a case for 
himself by reading the work of any American classical scholar side 
by side with a book by Gilbert Murray, or any history of literature 
by an American side by side with Francesco de Sanctis's " History 
of Italian Literature," or the work of any American critic side by 
side with the books of the great critics of the world. 

J. E. S. 



536 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 



SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE 

The " distinguished Englishman " to whom the Martian refers 
is of course Viscount Bryce, whose " American Commonwealth " dis- 
cusses the external aspects of our uniformity, the similarity of our 
buildings, cities, customs, and so on. Our spiritual unanimity has 
been most thoroughly examined by George Santayana, both in his 
earlier essays — as notably in " The Genteel Tradition " — and in his 
recent " Character and Opinion in the United States." 

For all the welter of writing about our educational establishment, 
only infrequent and incidental consideration has been bestowed, 
either favourably or unfavourably, on its regimental effect. As cus- 
todians of a going concern, the educators have busied themselves 
with repairs and replacements to the machinery rather than with the 
right of way; and lay critics have pretty much confined themselves 
to selecting between machines whose slightly differing routes all lie 
in the same general direction. The exception that proves the rule 
is " Shackled Youth," by Edward Yeomans. 

But undergraduate life in America has a genre of its own, the 
form of fiction known as " college stories." Nearly every important 
school has at some time had written round it a collection of tales 
that exploit its peculiar legends, traditions, and customs — for the 
most part a chafing-dish literature of pranks, patter, and athletic 
prowess whose murky and often distorted reflection of student atti- 
tudes is quite incidental to its business of entertaining. Owen 
Johnson's Lawrenceville stories — " The Prodigious Hickey," " Ten- 
nessee Shad," "The Varmint," "The Humming Bird "—are the 
classics of preparatory school life. Harvard has " Pepper," by H. E. 
Porter, " Harvard Episodes " and " The Diary of a Freshman," by 
Charles Flandrau, and Owen Wister's " Philosophy 4," the best of 
all college yarns. Yale has the books of Ralph D. Paine and of 
others. The Western universities have such volumes as " Ann Arbor 
Tales," by Karl Harriman, for Michigan, and " Maroon Tales," by 
W. J. Cuppy, for Chicago. George Fitch writes amusingly about 
life in the smaller Western colleges in " Petey Simmons at Siwash " 
and " At Good Old Siwash." 

The catalogue of serious college fiction is brief, and most of the 
novels are so propagandist that they are misrepresentative. For 
example, Owen Johnson's " Stover at Yale," which was some years 
out of date when it was published, misses the essential club spirit in 
New Haven by almost as wide a margin as Arthur Train's " The 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 537 

World and Thomas Kelly " departs from the normal club life in 
Cambridge; both authors set up the straw man of snobbery where 
snobs are an unimportant minority. Two recent novels, however, 
deal more faithfully with the college scene for the very reason that 
their authors were more interested in character than in setting: 
"This Side of Paradise," by Scott Fitzgerald, is true enough to 
have provoked endless controversy in Princeton; and "Salt: The 
Education of Griffith Adams," by Charles G. Norris, is a memorable 
appraisal of student ideals in a typical co-educational institution. 
Dorothy Canfield's " The Bent Twig " is also laid in a co-educational 
college. Booth Tarkington's " Ramsay Milholland " attends a State 
University; and the hero of " Gold Shod," by Newton Fuessle, is 
a revelatory failure of the State University regimen. To these add 
an autobiography — " An American in the Making, The Life Story 
of an Immigrant," by M. E. Ravage, whose candid report on his 
fellows at the Missouri State University is a masterpiece of sym- 
pathetic criticism. C. B. 



THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE 

To attempt to give references to specific books on so general and 
inclusive a topic would be an impertinence. But one may legiti- 
mately suggest the trends of investigation one would like to see 
thoroughly explored. In my own case they would be: (i) a study 
of the pioneer from the point of view of his cultural and religious 
interests, correlating those interests with his general economic status ; 
(2) a study of the revolutionary feeling of America (not formulas) 
in psychological terms and of its duration as an emotional driving 
force; (3) a study of the effects of the post-Civil War period and 
the industrial expansion upon the position of upper-class women in 
the United States; (4) a study of sexual maladjustment in American 
family life, correlated again with the economic status of the suc- 
cessful pioneer ; ( 5 ) a very careful study of the beginnings, rise, and 
spread of women's clubs, and their purposes and accomplishments, 
correlated chronologically with the development of club life of men 
and the extent of vice, gambling, and drunkenness; (6) a study of 
American religions in more or less Freudian terms as compensations 
for neurotic maladjustment; (7) a study of instrumentalism in 
philosophy and its implications for reform; (8) a serious attempt 
to understand and appraise the more or less disorganized jeunes, 
with some attention to comparing the intensity of their bitterness 
or optimism with the places of birth and upbringing. No special 



538 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

study of American educational systems or of the school or college 
life would be necessary, it seems to me, beyond, of course, a general 
knowledge. The intellectual life of the nation, after all, has little 
relation to the academic life. 

When such special studies had been finished by sympathetic inves- 
tigators, probably one of several writers could synthesize the results 
and give us a fairly definitive essay on the intellectual life of America. 
Such studies, however, have not yet been done, and without them I 
have had to write this essay to a certain extent en plein air. Thus 
it has been impossible entirely to avoid giving the impression of 
stating things dogmatically or intuitively. But as a matter of fact 
on all the topics I have suggested for study I have already given 
much thought and time, and consequently, whatever its literary form, 
the essay is not pure impressionism. H. E. S. 



SCIENCE 

There is no connected account of American achievement in science. 
Strangely enough, the most pretentious American book on the his- 
tory of science, Sedgwick and Tyler's " Short History of Science " 
(New York: Macmillan, 19 17), ignores the most notable figures 
among the author's countrymen. A useful biographical directory 
under the title of " American Men of Science " (New York 
Science Press, 1910, 2d edition), has been compiled by Professor 
James McKeen Cattell; a third revised edition has been prepared 
and issued this year prior to the appearance of the present volume. 

On the tendencies manifest in the United States there are several 
important papers. An address by Henry A. Rowland entitled " A 
Plea for Pure Science " {Popular Science Monthly, vol. LIX, 1901, 
pp. 170-188), is still eminently worth reading. The external condi- 
tions under which American scientists labour have been repeatedly 
discussed in recent years in such journals as Science and School and 
Society, both edited by Professor Cattell, who has himself appended 
very important discussions to the above-cited biographical lexicon. 
Against over-organization Professor William Morton Wheeler has 
recently published a witty and vigorous protest (" The Organiza- 
tion of Research," Science, January 21, 192 1, N. S. vol. LIII, pp. 

53-67). 

In order to give an understanding of the essence of scientific 
activity the general reader cannot do better than to trace the pro- 
cesses by which the master-minds of the past have brought order 
into the chaos that is at first blush presented by the world of reality. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 539 

In this respect the writings of the late Professor Ernst Mach are 
unsurpassed, and even the least mathematically trained layman 
can derive much insight from portions of his book " Die Mechanik " 
(Leipzig, 7th edition, 1912), accessible in T. J. McCormack's trans- 
lation under the title of " The Science of Mechanics " (Chicago: 
Open Court Publishing Co.). The section on Galileo may be spe- 
cially recommended. Mach's " Erkenntnis und Irrtum " (Leipzig, 
1906) contains most suggestive discussions of the psychology of 
investigation, dealing with such questions as the nature of a scien- 
tific problem, of experimentation, of hypothetical assumptions, etc. 
Much may also be learned from the general sections of P. Duhem's 
"La theorie physique, son objet et sa structure" (Paris, 1906). 
E. Duclaux's " Pasteur: Histoire d'un Esprit " has fortunately been 
rendered accessible by Erwin F. Smith and Florence Hedges under 
the title " Pasteur, the History of a Mind " (Philadelphia; Saunders, 
1920). It reveals in masterly fashion the methods by which a great 
thinker overcomes not only external opposition but the more baneful 
obstacles of scientific folk-lore. R. H. L. 



PHILOSOPHY 

The omission of Mr. Santayana's philosophy from the above ac- 
count indicates no lack of appreciation of its merits. Although 
written at Harvard, it is hardly an American philosophy. On one 
hand, Mr, Santayana is free from the mystical religious longings 
that have given our Idealisms life, and on the other, he is too confi- 
dent of the reality of culture and the value of the contemplative 
life to sanction that dominance of the practical which is the strong- 
hold of instrumentalism. 

The only histories of American Philosophy are those by Professor 
Woodbridge Riley. His "Early Schools" (Dodd, Mead & Co., 
1907), is a full treatment of the period in question, but his " Ameri- 
can Thought from Puritanism to Pragmatism" (H. Holt, 1915) is 
better reading and comes down to date. These are best read in con- 
nection with some history of American Literature such as Barrett 
Wendell's "Literary History of America" (Scribner's Sons, 1914). 
Royce's system is given in good condensed form in the last four 
chapters of his " Spirit of Modern Philosophy " (Houghton Mifflin, 
1899). Its exhaustive statement is " The World and the Individual " 
(2 vols., Macmillan, 1900-1). The " Philosophy of Loyalty " (Mac- 
millan, 1908) develops the ethics, and the " Problem of Chris- 
tianity " (2 vols., Macmillan, 19 13), relates his philosophy to 



540 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

Christianity. Hocking's religious philosophy is given in his '' Mean- 
ing of God in Human Experience" (Yale University Press, 1912). 
His general position is developed on one side in " Human Nature and 
Its Remaking" (Yale University Press, 19 18). Anything of James 
is good reading. His chief work is the " Principles of Psychology " 
(H. Holt, 1890), but the " Talks to Teachers on Psychology and 
Some of Life's Ideals " (H. Holt, 1907) and the " Will to Believe " 
(Longmans, Green & Co., 1899), better illustrate his attitude toward 
life. " Pragm.atism " (Longmans, Green & Co., 1907) introduces 
his technical philosophizing. His religious attitude can be got 
from the " Varieties of Religious Experience " (Longmans, Green 
& Co., 1902). Dewey has nowhere systematized his philosophy. Its 
technical points are exhibited in the " Essays in Experimental Logic " 
(University of Chicago Press, 1916). The "Influence of Darwin 
on Philosophy " (H. Holt, 19 10) has two especially readable essays, 
one the title-essay, the other on " Intelligence and Morals." The 
full statement of his ethics is the " Ethics " (Dewey and Tufts, H. 
Holt, 1908). He is at his best in "Education and Democracy" 
(Macmillan, 1916). " German Philosophy and Politics " (H. Holt, 
191 5) is a war-time reaction giving an interesting point of view 
as to the significance of German Philosophy. " The New Realism " 
(Macmillan, 1912) is a volume of technical studies by the Six 
Realists. " Creative Intelligence " (H. Holt, 1917), by John Dewey 
and others, is a similar volume of pragmatic studies. The reviews 
are also announcing another co-operative volume, " Essays in Critical 
Realism " by Santayana, Lovejoy and others. In a technical fashion 
Perry has discussed the " Present Tendencies in Philosophy " (Long- 
mans, Green & Co., 1912), but the best critical reaction to Ameri- 
can philosophy is that of Santayana: " Character and Opinion in 
the United States" (Scribner's Sons, 1920). Santayana's own chief 
philosophic contributions are the " Sense of Beauty " (Scribner's 
Sons, 1896), and the "Life of Reason" (5 vols., Scribner's 
Sons, 1905-6). The first two chapters of his " Winds of Doctrine " 
(Scribner's Sons, 1913), on the "Intellectual Temper of the Age" 
and " Modernism and Christianity," are also relevant. Brief but 
excellent expositions of Royce, Dewey, James, and Santayana by 
Morris R. Cohen have appeared in the New Republic, vols. XX- 
XXIII. H. C. B. 

LITERATURE 

Perhaps the most illuminating books for any one interested in the 
subject of the essay on literature are the private memorials of certain 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 541 

modern European writers. For a sense of everything the American 
literary life is not, one might read, for instance, the Letters of 
Ibsen, Dostoievsky, Chekhov, Flaubert, Taine and Leopardi — all 
of which have appeared, in whole or in part, in English. 

V. W. B. 



MUSIC 

What little there is that is worth reading concerning American 
music is scattered through magazine articles and chapters in books 
upon other musical subjects. Daniel Gregory Mason has a sensible 
and illuminating chapter, " Music in America," in his "Contemporary 
Composers." The section, " America," in Chapter XVI of the Stan- 
ford- Forsyth " History of Music " contrives to be tactful and at 
the same time just. Two books that should be read by any one 
interested in native composition are Cecil Forsyth's " Music and 
Nationalism " and Lawrence Gilman's " Edward MacDowell." 
Rupert Hughes's " Contemporary American Composers " is twenty 
years old, but still interesting; it contains sympathetic — not to say 
glowing — accounts of the lives and works of an incredibly large 
number of Americans who do and did pursue the art of musical 
composition. To know what an artist means when he asks to be 
understood read pages 240 and 241 of Cabell's " Jurgen " — if you 
can get it; also the volume, "La Foire sur la Place," of "Jean 
Christophe," D. T. 



POETRY 

Bodenheim, Maxwell: "Minna and Myself" (Pagan Publishing 
Co.); "Advice" (Alfred A. Knopf). 

"H. D.": "Sea-Garden" (Houghton Mifflin). 

Eliot, T. S.: "Poems" (Alfred A. Knopf). 

Fletcher, John Gould: " Irradiations: Sand and Spray " (Hough- 
ton Mifflin) ; " Goblins and Pagodas " (Houghton Mifflin) ; " The 
Tree of Life" (Macmillan) ; "Japanese Prints" (Four Seas Co.); 
" Breakers and Granite " (Macmillan). 

Frost, Robert: "North of Boston" (Holt); "A Boy's Will" 
(Holt); "Mountain Interval" (Holt). 

Kreymborg, Alfred: " Plays for Poem-Mimes " (Others) ; " Blood 
of Things " (Nicholas Brown) ; " Plays for Merry Andrews " (Sun- 
wise Turn). 



542 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

Lindsay, Vachel: "The Congo" (Macmillan); "The Chinese 
Nightingale" (Macmillan). 

Lowell, Amy: " Men, Women and Ghosts " (Houghton Mifflin); 
" Can Grande's Castle " (Houghton Mifflin) ; " Pictures of the Float- 
ing World " (Houghton Mifflin) ; " Legends " (Houghton Mifflin). 

Masters, Edgar Lee: "Spoon River Anthology" (Macmillan); 
"The Great Valley" (Macmillan); "Domesday Book" (Mac- 
millan). 

Pound, Ezra: "Umbra" (Elkin Matthews); "Lustra" (Alfred 
A. Knopf). 

Robinson, Edwin Arlington: " Children of the Night " (Scrib- 
ners); "The Town Down the River" (Scribners); "The Man 
Against the Sky" (Macmillan); "Merlin" (Macmillan); "Cap- 
tain Craig" (Macmillan); "The Three Taverns" (Macmillan); 
"Avon's Harvest" (Macmillan); "Lancelot" (Scott and Seltzer). 

Sandburg, Carl: "Smoke and Steel" (Harcourt, Brace & Co.). 

Stevens, Wallace: See " The New Poetry;" " Others " Anthology. 

Teasdale, Sara: " Rivers to the Sea " (Macmillan). 

Untermeyer, Louis: " The New Adam " (Harcourt, Brace & 
Co.); " Including Horace " (Harcourt, Brace & Co.). 

Anthologies: " The New Poetry," Edited by Harriet Monroe 
and Alice Corbin Henderson (Macmillan) ; "An American Miscel- 
lany " (Harcourt, Brace & Co.); "Others for 1919 " edited by 
Alfred Kreymborg (A. A. Knopf) ; " Some Imagist Poets " First, 
Second and Third Series (Houghton Mifflin). 

Criticism: Untermeyer, Louis, " The New Era in American 
Poetry " (Henry Holt), a comprehensive, lively, but sometimes mis- 
leading survey. C. A. 

ART 

The reader may obtain most of the data on the history of Ameri- 
can art from Samuel Isham's " History of American Painting," 
and Charles H. Caffin's " Story of American Painting." Very little 
writing of an analytical nature has been devoted to American art, 
and nearly all of it is devoid of a sense of perspective and of any- 
thing approaching a realization of the position that American work 
holds in relation to that of Europe. Outside of the writing that 
is only incompetent, there are the books and articles by men whose 
purpose is to " boost " the home product for nationalistic or com- 
mercial reasons. In contrast with all this is Mr. Roger E. Fry's 
essay on Ryder, in the Burlington Magazine for April, 1908 — a 
masterful appreciation of the artist. W. P. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 543 

THE THEATRE 

The bibliography of this subject is extensive, but in the main 
unilluminating. It consists chiefly in a magnanimous waving aside 
of what is, and an optimistic dream of what is to be. Into this 
category fall most, if not all, of the many volumes written by the 
college professors and such of their students as have, upon gradua- 
tion, carried with them into the world the college-professor manner 
of looking at things. Nevertheless, Professor William Lyon Phelps' 
" The Twentieth Century Theatre," for all its deviations from fact, 
and Professor Thomas H. Dickinson's " The Case of American 
Drama," may be looked into by the more curious. Mr. Arthur 
Ruhl's '' Second Nights," with its penetrating humour, contains 
several excellent pictures of certain phases of the native theatre. 
Section IV of Mr. Walter Prichard Eaton's " Plays and Players," 
Mr. George Bronson-Howard's searching series of papers entitled, 
" What's Wrong with the Theatre," and perhaps even Mr. George 
Jean Nathan's " The Popular Theatre," " The Theatre, The Drama, 
The Girls," " Comedians All," and " Mr. George Jean Nathan Pre- 
sents " may throw some light upon the subject. Miss Akins' 
" Papa " and all of Mr. O'Neill's plays are available in book form. 
The bulk of inferior native dramaturgy is similarly available to the 
curious-minded: there are hundreds of these lowly specimens on 
view in the nearest book store. G. J. N. 



ECONOMIC OPINION 

The literature of economic opinion in America is almost as vol- 
uminous as the printed word. It ranges from the ponderous treatises 
of professed economists, wherein " economic laws " are printed in 
italics, to the sophisticated novels of the self-elect, in which economic 
opinion is a by-product of clever conversation. Not only can one 
find economic opinion to his taste, but he can have it in any form 
he likes. Perhaps the most human and reasonable application of the 
philosophy of laissez-faire to the problems of industrial society is 
to be found in the pages of W. G. Sumner. Of particular interest 
are the essays contained in the volumes entitled " Earth Hunger," 
" The Challenge of Facts," and " The Forgotten Man." The most 
subtle and articulate account of the economic order as an automatic, 
self-regulating mechanism is J. B. Clark, " The Distribution of 
Wealth." An able and readable treatise, characterized alike by a 



544 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

modified classical approach and by a recognition of the facts of 
modern industrial society, is F. W. Taussig, " The Principles of 
Economics." The " case for capitalism " has never been set forth 
as an articulate whole. The theoretical framework of the defence is 
to be found in any of the older treatises upon economic theory. A 
formal apologia is to be found in the last chapter of almost every 
text upon economics under some such title as " A Critique of the 
Existing Order," " Wealth and Welfare," or " Economic Progress." 
A defence of " what is," whatever it may chance to be, characterized 
alike by brilliancy and ignorance, is P. E. More's " Aristocracy and 
Justice." Contemporary opinion favourable to capitalism may be 
found, in any requisite quantity and detail, in The Wall Street 
Journal, The Commercial and Financial Chronicle, and the publica- 
tions of the National Association of Manufacturers. The Congres- 
sional Record, a veritable treasure house of economic fallacy, pre- 
sents fervent pleas both for an unqualified capitalism and for capi- 
talism with endless modifications. The literature of the economics 
of " control " is beginning to be large. The essay by H. C. Adams, 
"■ The Relation of the State to Industrial Activity," elaborating the 
thesis that the function of the state is to regulate " the plane of 
competition," has become a classic. The best account of the economic 
opinion of organized labour is to be found in R. F. Hoxie, " Trade 
Unionism in the United States." Typical examples of excellent work 
done by men who do not profess to be economists are W. Lippmann, 
" Drift and Mastery," the opinions (often dissenting) delivered by 
Mr. Justice Holmes and Mr. Justice Brandeis, of the United States 
Supreme Court, and the articles frequently contributed to periodicals 
by T. R. Powell upon the constitutional aspects of economic ques- 
tions. The appearance of such studies as the brief for the shorter 
working day in the case of Bunting v. Oregon, prepared by F. Frank- 
furter and J. Goldmark, and of the " Report on the Steel Strike of 
19 19," by the Commission of Inquiry of the Interchurch World 
Movement indicates that we are beginning to base our opinions and 
our policies upon " the facts." Among significant contributions are 
the articles appearing regularly in such periodicals as The New 
Republic and The Nation. At last the newer economics of the 
schools is beginning to assume the form of an articulate body of 
doctrine. The books of T. B. Veblen, particularly " The Theory of 
Business Enterprise," and " The Instinct of Workmanship," contain 
valuable pioneer studies. In '' Personal Competition " and in the 
chapters upon " Valuation " in " Social Process," C. H. Cooley has 
shown how economic institutions are to be treated. The newer 
economics, however, begins with the publication in 1913 of W. C. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 545 

Mitchell, " Business Cycles." This substitutes an economics of 
process for one of statics and successfully merges theoretical and 
statistical inquiry. It marks the beginning of a new era in the 
study of economics. The work in general economic theory has fol- 
lowed the leads blazed by Veblen, Cooley, and Mitchell. W. H, 
Hamilton, in " Current Economic Problems," elaborates a theory of 
the control of industrial development, interspersed with readings 
from many authors. L. C. Marshal, in " Readings in Industrial 
Society," attempts, through selections drawn from many sources, an 
appraisal of the institutions which together make up the economic 
order. D. Friday, in " Profits, Wages, and Prices," shows how much 
meaning a few handfuls of figures contain and how much violence 
they can do to established principles. The National Bureau of 
Economic Research is soon to publish the results of a careful and 
thorough statistical inquiry into the division of income in the United 
States. Upon particular subjects such as trusts, tariffs, railroads, 
labour unions, etc., the literature is far too large to be catalogued 
here. There is no satisfactory history of economic opinion in the 
United States. T. B. Veblen's " The Place of Science in Modern 
Civilization " contains a series of essays which constitute the most 
convincing attack upon the classical system and which point the 
way to an institutional economics. Many articles dealing with the 
development of economic doctrines are to be found in the files of 
The Quarterly Journal of Economics and of The Journal of Political 
Economy. An excellent statement of the present situation in eco- 
nomics is an unpublished essay by W. C. Mitchell, " The Promise of 
Economic Science." W. H. H. 



RADICALISM 

For exposition of the leading radical theories the reader is urged 
to go, not to second-hand authorities, but to their foremost advo- 
cates. " Capital " by Karl Marx (Charles H. Kerr) is of course the 
chief basis of Socialism. There is nothing better on Anarchism than 
the article in the " Encyclopedia Britannica " by Prince Kropotkin. 
For revolutionary industrial unionism it is important to know 
" Speeches and Editorials " by Daniel de Leon (New York Labor 
News Co.). De Leon was one of the founders of the I.W.W., 
and his ideas not only influenced the separatist labour movements in 
the United States but the shop-steward movement in England and 
the Soviets of Russia. " Guild Socialism " by G. D. H. Cole is the 
best statement of this recent theory, while " The State and Revolu- 



546 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

tion " by Nikolai Lenin (George Allen and Unwin) explains the 
principles and tactics of modern Communism. To these should be 
added another classic, " Progress and Poverty " by Henry George 
(Doubleday Page). 

On the origins of the American government it is important to 
read " Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy " and " Economic 
Interpretation of the Constitution " by Charles A. Beard (Mac- 
millan). 

The " History of Trade Unionism " by Sidney and Beatrice Webb 
(Longmans, Green), is an invaluable account of the growth of the 
British labour movement, which has many similarities to our own. 
" Industrial Democracy " by the same authors, issued by the same 
publisher, is the best statement of the theories of trade unionism. 
The " History of Labor in the United States " by John R. Com- 
mons and associates (Macmillan), is a scholarly work, while " Trade 
Unionism in the United States " by Robert F. Hoxie (Appleton), is 
a more analytical treatment, " The I. W. W. " by Paul F. Brissen- 
den (Longmans, Green), is a full documentary history. Significant 
recent tendencies are recorded in " The New Unionism in the Cloth- 
ing Industry" by Budish and Soule (Harcourt, Brace). The last 
chapters of " The Great Steel Strike " by William Z. Foster (B. W. 
Huebsch), expound his interesting interpretation of the trade unions. 

For a statement of the functional attitude toward public prob- 
lems one should read " Authority, Liberty and Function " by Ramiro 
de Maeztu (Geo. Allen and Unwin). For a brief and readable 
application of this attitude to economics, " The Acquisitive Society " 
by R. H. Tawney (Harcourt, Brace), is to be recommended. 

*' Modern Social Movements " by Savel Zimand (H. W. Wilson), 
is an authoritative guidebook to present radical movements through- 
out the world, and contains an excellent bibliography. And we 
must not forget the voluminous Report of the New York State 
Legislative Committee on Radicalism (the Lusk Committee), which 
not only collects a wealth of current radical literature, but offers an 
entertaining and instructive example of the current American atti- 
tude toward such matters. G. S. 



THE SMALL TOWN 

Bibliography: " A Hoosier Holiday," by Theodore Dreiser. 

" Winesburg, Ohio," by Sherwood Anderson. " Main Street," by 
Sinclair Lewis. L. R. R. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 547 



HISTORY 

The late Henry Adams had much in common with Samuel But- 
ler, that other seeker after an education. He knew that he had 
written a very good book (his studies on American history were 
quite as excellent in their way as " Erewhon " was in a some- 
what different genre) and he was equally aware of the sad fact 
that his work was not being read. In view of the general public 
indifference towards history it is surprising how much excellent 
work has been done. Three names suggest themselves when his- 
tory in America is mentioned, Robinson, Beard, and Breasted. 
Their works for the elementary schools have not been surpassed in 
any country and their histories (covering the entire period from 
ancient Eg5^t down to the present time) will undoubtedly help to 
overcome the old and firmly established prejudice that " history is 
dull " and will help to create a new generation which shall prefer a 
good biography or history to the literature of our current periodicals. 

The group of essays published last year by Professor Robinson 
— the pioneer of our modern historical world — under the title of 
" The New History " contains several papers of a pleasantly sug- 
gestive nature and we especially recommend " History for the Com- 
mon Man " for those who want to investigate the subject in greater 
detail, and " The New Allies of History " for those who want to 
get an idea of the struggle that goes on between the New and the 
Old Movements in our contemporary historical world. 

But it is impossible to suggest a three- four- or five-foot bookshelf 
for those who desire to understand the issues of the battle that is 
taking place. The warfare between the forces of the official School 
and University History and those who have a vision of something 
quite different is merely a part of the great social and economic and 
spiritual struggle that has been going on ever since, in the days of 
the Encyclopedists. The scene is changing constantly. The leaders 
hardly know what is happening. The soldiers who do the actual 
fighting are too busy with the work at hand to waste time upon 
academic discussions of the Higher Strategy. And the public will 
have to do what the public did during the great war — study the 
reports from all sides (the revelant and the irrevelant — the news 
from Helsingfors-by-way-of- Geneva and from Copenhagen-by-way- 
of Constantinople) and use its own judgment as to the probable 
outcome of the conflict. H. W. V. L. 



54S BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

SEX 

As might be supposed, there has been little writing on sex in this 
country — such discussion, more or less superficial, of the social 
aspects as may be found in books on the family, on marriage or 
prostitution, some quasi-medical treatises and of late a few books 
along the lines of Freudian psychology, that is all. Among all the 
organizations of the country there is no society corresponding to the 
British Society for the Study of Sex. I doubt if such a society or 
its publications would be tolerated, since even novelists who, like 
Dreiser, express an interest in sex comparatively directly, run afoul 
of public opinion, and a book such as " Women in Love " by D. H. 
Lawrence, its publisher felt called upon to print without his name. 

It is not surprising, therefore, that in English the most adequate 
discussions of sex have been made by an Englishman, Havelock Ellis 
— " Studies in the Psychology of Sex." Among less well known writ- 
ing on the subject by Ellis I would note in particular an illuminating 
page or two in his essay on Casanova (" Affirmations "). 

Discussion of the theories of distinguishing between mating and 
parenthood and of crisis psychology may be found in articles by the 
writer in the International Journal of Ethics, July, 19 15, January, 
19 1 6, October, 19 17, and in The American Anthropologist, March, 
19 16, and The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific 
Methods, March, 19 18. 

" The Behaviour of Crowds " by E. D. Martin, and " French 
Ways and Their Meaning " by Edith Wharton are recent books that 
the reader of a comparative turn of mind will find of interest, and 
if he is not already familiar with the writings of the Early Christian 
Fathers I commend to him some browsing in the " Ante-Nicene 
Christian Library" and the " Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers." 

E. C. P. 



THE FAMILY 

For statistical facts which have a bearing on the tendencies of the 
family in the United States, the following group of sources has been 
consulted: 

"Abstract of the Census, 1910;" the preliminary sheets of the 
" Census of 1920;" Report on " Marriage and Divorce in 1916," 
published by the Bureau of the Census; Bulletin of the Woman's 
Bureau, U. S. Department of Labour on " What Became of Women 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 549 

Who Went Into War Industries;" Bulletin of the U. S, Department 
of Agriculture on " The Farm Woman;" Bulletin of the U. S. Chil- 
dren's Bureau on " Standards of Child Welfare." Economic aspects 
of the family and income data were acquired from " Conditions of 
Labour in American Industries," by Edgar Sydenstricker, and " The 
Wealth and Income of the People of the United States," by Willford 
I. King. For facts concerning longevity, the aid of the Census was 
supplemented by '' The Trend of Longevity in the United States," 
by C. H. Forsyth, in the Journal of the American Statistical Associa- 
tion, Vol. 128. For the long biological perspective to counteract the 
near-sighted view of the Census, " The New Stone Age in Northern 
Europe," by John M. Tyler may be commended. Psychological 
aspects of family relationships are discussed in a scientific and stimu- 
lating way in the published " Proceedings of the International 
Women Physicians' Conference, 1919." K. A. 



RACIAL MINORITIES 

No author or group of authors has yet attempted to treat in any 
systematic and comprehensive way the position and the problem of 
the several racial minorities in the United States. A perfect 
bibliography of existing materials on the subject would be most 
helpful, but it could not make good the existing shortage of fact, 
and of thoughtful interpretation, < 

The anthropological phase of the subject is discussed with au- 
thority by Franz Boas in " The Mind of Primitive Man " (Mac- 
millan, 19 13), and by Robert H. Lowie in " Culture and Ethnology " 
(McMurtrie, 191 7). Some information on racial inter-marriage is 
to be found in Drachsler's " Democracy and Assimilation — The 
Blending of Immigrant Heritages in America" (Macmillan, 1920). 
Among recent reports of psychological tests of race-difference, the 
following are of special interest: " A Study of Race Differences in 
New York City," by Katherine Murdock, (School and Society, 
vol. XI, no. 266, p. 147, 31 January, 1920); " Racial Differences in 
Mental Fatigue," by Thomas R. Garth (Journal of Applied 
Psychology, vol. IV, nos. 2 and 3, p. 235, June-Sept. 1920); "A 
Comparative Study in the Intelligence of White and Colored Chil- 
dren," by R. A. Schwegler and Edith Winn (Journal of Educational 
Research, vol. II, no. 5, p. 838, December, 1920) ; " The Intelli- 
gence of Negro Recruits," by M. R. Trabue (Natural History, vol. 
XIX, no. 6, p. 680, 1919); "The Intelligence of Negroes at Camp 



550 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

Lee, Virginia," by George Oscar Ferguson, Jr. {School and Society, 
vol. IX, no. 233, p. 721, 14 June, 1919); and the Government's 
official report of all the psychological tests given in the cantonments 
(" Memoirs of the National Academy of Science," vol. XV, Wash- 
ington, Government Printing Office, 192 1). 

The most important single source of information on the present 
status of the coloured race in the United States is "The Negro Year 
Book," edited by Monroe N. Work (Negro Year Book Pub. Co., 
Tuskegee Institute, Alabama); the edition for 1918-19 contains an 
extensive bibliography. Brawley's " Short History of the American 
Negro" (Macmillan, rev. ed., 1919) presents in text-book form a 
general narrative, together with supplementary chapters on such 
topics as religion and education among the Negroes. The Govern- 
ment report on "Negro Population, 1790-1915" (Washington, 
Bureau of the Census, Government Printing Office, 19 18), is in- 
valuable. Important recent developments are treated in " Negro 
Migration in 1916-17 " and " The Negro at Work During the World 
War and During Reconstruction " (Washington, Dep't of Labour, 
1919 and 1920 respectively). Some notion of the various manifes- 
tations of prejudice against the Negro may be gathered from the 
following sources: "Negro Education" {U . S. Bureau of Educa- 
tion Bulletin, 1916, nos. 38 and 39) ; " The White and the Colored 
Schools of Virginia as Measured by the Ayres Index," by George 
Oscar Ferguson, Jr. {School and Society, vol. XII, no. 297, p. 170, 
4 Sept., 1920) ; " Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 
1 889-19 1 8," and "Disfranchisement of Colored Americans in the 
Presidential Election of 1920 " (New York, National Association for 
the Advancement of Coloured People, 19 19 and 192 1 respectively). 
A few representative expressions from the Negroes themselves are: 
" Up from Slavery, an Autobiography," by Booker T. Washington 
(Doubleday, 1901); " Darkwater," by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois 
(Harcourt, 1920) ; The Messenger (a Negro Socialist-syndicalist 
magazine, 2305 Seventh Avenue, New York) ; and the " Universal 
Negro Catechism " (Universal Negro Improvement Association, 56 
West i3Sth Street, New York). 

A great body of valuable information on the Indians is collected 
in two publications of the Government, the second of which contains 
a very extensive bibliography; "Indian Population in the United 
States and Alaska, 1910 " (Washington, Bureau of the Census, 
Government Printing Office, 1915), and the " Handbook of American 
Indians North of Mexico," edited by Frederick Webb Hodge (Wash- 
ington, Bureau of Ethnology, Government Printing Office, 1907-10, 
2 vols.). An annual report containing current data on the status of 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 551 

the Indian is published by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. 
Francis Ellington Leupp, who held this title from 1905 to 1909, 
was the author of a volume which presents in popular form the 
results of official experience (" The Indian and His Problem," 
Scribner, 19 10). 

The " American Jewish Year Book " (Philadelphia, Jewish Publi- 
cation Society of America) is an extremely useful volume, and par- 
ticularly so because one must refer to it for statistical information 
which in the case of the other racial minorities is available in the 
reports of the national census. In the American Magazine for April, 
1921, Harry Schneiderman, the editor of the " Year Book," assembles 
a great many facts bearing upon the relation of the Jews to the 
economic, social, political, and intellectual life of the country (" The 
Jews of the United States," p. 24). Of special interest to students 
of the Semitic problem is Berkson's " Theories of Americanization; a 
Critical Study with Special Reference to the Jewish Group " 
(Teachers' College, Columbia University, 1920). 

The standard works on the Oriental question are Coolidge's 
" Chinese Immigration " (Holt, 1909), and Millis's " Japanese Prob- 
lem in the United States " (Macmillan, 1915). The Japanese prob- 
lem in California is treated statistically in a booklet prepared recently 
by the State Board of Control (" California and the Oriental," 
Sacramento, State Printing Office, 1920), and in a symposium which 
appeared in Tke Pacific Review for December, 1920 (Seattle, Uni- 
versity of Washington). G. T. R. 



ADVERTISING 

Expect from me no recommendation of the " scientific " treatises 
on advertising or of the professional psychological analyses of the 
instincts. Books, books in tons, have been written about advertis- 
ing, and as far as I am concerned, every single one of them is right. 
Read these, if you have the hardihood, and remain mute. Read 
them, I should say, and be eternally damned. Read them and 
retire rapidly to a small room comfortably padded and securely 
locked. J. T. S. 



BUSINESS 

Within the limits of this space anything like an adequate refer- 
ence to the source books of fact and thought is impossible. All 



552 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

that may be attempted is to suggest an arbitrary way through the 
whole of the subject — a thoroughfare from which the reader may 
take off where he will as his own interests develop. For the founda- 
tions of an economic understanding one needs only to read " Prin- 
ciples of Political Economy," by Simon Newcomb, the American 
astronomer, who in a mood of intellectual irritation inclined his 
mind to this mundane matter and produced the finest book of its 
kind in the world. For the rough physiognomy of American economic 
phenomena there is " A Century of Population Growth," Bureau of 
the Census, 1909, a splendid document prepared under the direction 
of S. N. D. North. Katharine Coman's " Industrial History of the 
United States " is an important work in itself and contains, besides, 
an excellent and full bibliography. " Crises and Depressions " and 
" Corporations and the State," by Theodore E. Burton; " Forty 
Years of American Finance," by Alexander D. Noyes; "Railroad 
Transportation, Its History and Its Laws," by A. T. Hadley; 
"Trusts, Pools and Corporations," by Wm. Z. Ripley; and ''The 
Book of Wheat," by Peter Tracy Dondlinger, are books in which 
the separate phases indicated by title are essentially treated. For 
dissertation, interpretation, and universal thought every student will 
find himself deeply indebted to " Trade Morals, Their Origin, Growth 
and Province," by Edward D. Page; " The Economic Interpreta- 
tion of History," by James E. Thorold Rogers; "History of the 
New World Called America," by E. J. Payne; " Economic Studies," 
by Walter Bagehot; "Essays in Finance," by R. Giffen; "Recent 
Economic Changes," by David A. Wells, and "The Challenge of 
Facts and Other Essays," by William Graham Sumner. 

G. G. 



ENGINEERING 

Literature covering the function of the engineer in society, espe- 
cially in America, is very limited compared with books of informa- 
tion on most subjects. Engineering activities such as are usually 
described cover the technical achievements of the profession. Use- 
ful material, however, will be found scattered throughout the tech- 
nical literature and engineering society proceedings especially among 
the addresses and articles of leading engineers prepared for special 
occasions. A comprehensive history of engineering has never been 
written, although there are many treatises dealing with particular de- 
velopments in this field. Among these may be mentioned Bright's 
"Engineering Science, 1837-1897 "; Matschoss's " Beitrage zur 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES SS3 

Geschichte der Technik und Industrie " (" Jahrbuch des Vereines 
deutscher Ingenieure ") ; and Smiles's " Lives of the Engineers." 
On engineering education, the " Proceedings of the Society for the 
Promotion of Engineering Education" and Bulletin No. ii of the 
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, " A Study 
of Engineering Education," by Charles R. Mann, offer useful in- 
formation. Concerning the status of the engineer in the economic 
order, Taussig's " Inventors and Money Makers," Veblen's " The 
Engineers and the Price System," together with Frank Watts's " An 
Introduction to the Psychological Factors of Industry," will be 
found of value. On the relation between labour and the engineer, 
much can be found in The Annals of the American Academy of 
Political and Social Science for September, 1920, on " Labor, Man- 
agement and Production." O. S. B., Jr. 



NERVES 

Complete works of Cotton Mather; also of Jonathan Edwards. 
Complete works of Dr. George M. Beard, notably his " American 
Nervousness," Putnam, 1881. Medical publications of Dr. S. Weir 
Mitchell. Dr. George M. Parker: " The Discard Heap- 
Neurasthenia," TV. Y. Medical Journal, October 22, 1910. Dr. 
William Browning: " Is there such a thing as Neurasthenia?" 
N.. Y. State Medical Journal, January, 191 1. Dr. Morton Prince: 
" The Unconscious," Macmillan, 1914. Professor Edwin B. Holt: 
*' The Freudian Wish." Dr. Edward J. Kempf : " The Autonomic 
Function and the Personality." Complete works of Professor Freud, 
in translation and in the original. 

Files of Journal of Abnormal Psychology, to date. Files of 
Psychoanalytic Review, to date. Files of Imago, to date. Files of 
Internationale Zeitschrift fuer Aerztliche Psychoanlyse, to date. Dr. 
A. A. Brill, " Psychoanalysis," third edition. " Character and Opin- 
ion in the United States," by George Santayana. " Studies in 
American Intolerance," by Alfred B. Kuttner, The Dial, March 14 
and 28, 1918. A. B. K. 



MEDICINE 

No attempt is here made to give any exhaustive, or even sugges- 
tive, bibliography. Only specific references in the text itself are 
here given in full, so that the reader may find them for himself, if 



554 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

he so desires. But on the general subject of " Professionalism," 
although it deals more with the profession of law than of medicine, 
some valuable and stimulating observations can be found in the 
chapter of that name in " Our Social Heritage," by Graham Wallas 
(Yale University Press, 192 1). 

Bezzola: Quoted from " Preventive Medicine and Hygiene," 
Rosenau, 1920, p. 340. 

Clouston: " The Hygiene of the Mind," 1909. 

Cole: " The University Department of Medicine," Scieitce, N. S., 
vol. LI, No. 13 18, p. 329, 

Elderton and Pearson: " A First Study of the Influence of Paren- 
tal Alcoholism on the Physique and Ability of the Offspring," Francis 
Galton Eugenics Laboratory Memoirs, 1910, No. 10. 

Pearl: " The Effect of Parental Alcoholism upon the Progeny in 
the Domestic Fowl," Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 1916, vol. II, p. 380. 

Peterson: *' Credulity and Cures," Jour. Amer. Med. Assn., 1919, 
vol. LXXIII, p. 1737. 

Rosenau: " Preventive Medicine and Hygiene," 1920. 

Stockard: Interstate Medical Jour., 19 16, vol. XXIII, No. 6. 

Vaughan: " The Service of Medicine to Civilization," Jour. 
Amer. Med. Assn., 1914, vol. LXII, p. 2003. 

Vincent: " Ideals and Their Function in Medical Education," 
Jottr. Amer. Med. Assn., 1920, vol. LXXIV, p. 1065. 

ANON. 



SPORT AND PLAY 

Mr. Spalding, the well-known sporting goods manufacturer, is also 
the publisher of the Spalding Athletic Library, which contains, 
besides rule books and record books of various sports, a series of 
text-books, at ten cents the copy, bearing such titles as " How to 
Play the Outfield," " How to Catch," " How to Play Soccer," " How 
to Learn Golf," etc. Authorship of these works is credited to 
famous outfielders, catchers, soccer players, and golfers, but as the 
latter can field, catch, play soccer, and golf much better than they 
can write, the actual writing of the volumes was wisely left to 
persons who make their living by the pen. The books are recom- 
mended, as a cure for insomnia at least. The best sporting fiction 
we know of, practically the only sporting fiction an adult may read 
without fear of stomach trouble, is contained in the collected works 
of the late Charles E. Van Loan. R. W. L. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 555 



AMERICAN CIVILIZATION FROM THE FOREIGN POINT 

OF VIEW 

Frances Milton Trollope: " The Domestic Manners of the 
Americans," London, 1832. 

The rest is silence ... or repetition. 

E. B. 

1^ The views of foreign travellers in the United States are summarized 
in John Graham Brooks's " As Others See Us," New York, 1908. — The 
Editor. 



WHO'S WHO 
OF THE CONTRIBUTORS TO 
THIS VOLUME 



WHO'S WHO OF THE CONTRIBUTORS TO 
THIS VOLUME 

Conrad Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1899, and was 
graduated from Harvard in 1912. His books include several volumes 
of poems, " Earth Triumphant," " Turns and Movies," " The Jig of 
Forslin," " Nocturne of Remembered Spring," " The Charnel Rose," " The 
House of Dust," and " Punch : The Immortal Liar," and one volume of 
critical essays, " Scepticisms : Notes on Contemporary Poetry." 

Anonymous, the author of the essay on " Medicine," is an American 
physician who has gained distinction in the field of medical research, but 
who for obvious reasons desires to have his name withheld. 

Katharine Anthony was born in Arkansas, and was educated at the 
Universities of Tennessee, Chicago, and Heidelberg. She has done 
research and editorial work for the Russell Sage Foundation, National 
Consumers' League, The National Board, Y. W. C. A., and other national 
reform organizations, and is the author of " Feminism in Germany and 
Scandinavia," " Margaret Fuller : A Psychological Biography," and other 
books. 

O. S. Beyer, Jr., was graduated from the Stevens Institute of Tech- 
nology as a mechanical engineer in 1907, and did graduate work in rail- 
way and industrial economics in the Universities of Pennsylvania and 
New York. After some experience as an engineering assistant and gen- 
eral foreman on various railways, and as research engineer in the Uni- 
versity of Illinois, he helped organize the U. S. Army School of Military 
Aeronautics during the War, and later took charge of the Department of 
Airplanes. He was subsequently requested by the U. S. Army Ordnance 
Department to organize and operate schools for training ordnance special- 
ists and officers, and in order to conduct this work, he was commissioned 
Captain. After the termination of the War, he helped promote, and 
subsequently assumed charge in the capacity of Chief, Arsenal Orders 
Section, of the significant industrial developments carried forward in the 
Army arsenals. He has contributed numerous articles to technical 
periodicals and proceedings of engineering and other societies. 

Ernest Boyd is an Irish critic and journalist, who has lived in this 
country for some years, and is now on the staff of the New York Evening 
Post. He was educated in France, Germany, and Switzerland for the 
British Consular Service, which he entered in 1913. After having served 
in the United States, Spain, and Denmark, he resigned from official life 
in order to take up the more congenial work of literature and journalism. 
He has edited Standish O'Grady's " Selected Essays " for Every Irish- 
man's Library and translated Heinrich Mann's " Der Untertan " for the 
European Library, and is the author of three volumes dealing with modern 
Anglo-Irish Literature : " Ireland's Literary Renaissance," " The Contem- 
porary Drama of Ireland," and " Appreciations and Depreciations." 

559 



y 



560 WHO'S WHO OF CONTRIBUTORS 

Clarence Britten was born in Pella, Iowa, in 1887. and was graduated 
from Harvard in 1912 as of 1910. He was Instructor of English in the 
Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, in the Department of 
University Extension, State of Massachusetts, and. in the University of 
Wisconsin. He has been editor of the Canadian Journal of Music, and 
from 1918 to 1920 was an editor of the Dial. 

Van Wyck Brooks was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1886, and 
was graduated from Harvard in 1907, as of 1908. He was instructor in 
English in Leland Stanford University from 191 1 to 1913, and is now 
associate editor of the Freeman. Among his books are " America's 
Coming-of-Age," " Letters and Leadership," and " The Ordeal of Mark 
Twain." 

Harold Chapman Brown was born in Springfield, Mass., in 1879, and 
was educated at Williams and Harvard, from which he received the 
degree of Ph.D. in 1905. He was instructor in philosophy in Columbia 
University until 1914, and since then has been an instructor in Leland 
Stanford University. During the War he was with the American Red 
Cross, Home Service, at Camp Fremont. He has contributed numerous 
articles on philosophy to technical journals, and is co-author of "Creative 
Intelligence." 

Zechariah Chafee, Jr., was born in Providence, R. I., in 1885, and 
was educated at Brown University and the Harvard Law School. After 
several years' practice of the law in Providence, and executive work in 
connection with various manufacturing industries, he became Assistant 
Professor of Law in Harvard University in 1916, and Professor of Law 
in 1919. He is the author of " Cases on Negotiable Instruments," " Free- 
dom of Speech," and various articles in law reviews and other periodicals. 

Frank M. Colby was born in Washington, D. C, in 1865, and was 
graduated from Columbia in 1888. He was Professor of Economics in 
New York University from 1895 to 1900, and has been editor of the 
" New International Encyclopedia " since 1900, and of the " New Inter- 
national Year Book " since 1907. He is the author of " Outlines of Gen- 
eral History," " Imaginary Obligations," " Constrained Attitudes," and 
"The Margin of Hesitation." 

Caret Garrett was born in Pana, 111., in 1878, and from 1900 to 1912 
was a financial writer on the New York Sun, the Wall Street Journal, 
the New York Evening Post, and the New York Times. He was the first 
editor of the New York Times Annalist in 1913-1914, and was executive 
editor of the New York Tribune from 1916 to 1919. He is the author of 
" The Driver," " The Blue Wound," " An Empire Beleaguered," " The 
Mad Dollar," and various economic and political essays. 

Walton H. Hamilton was born in Tennessee in 1881, was graduated 
from the University of Texas in 1907, and received the degree of Ph.D. 
from the University of Michigan in 1913. After teaching at the Uni- 
versities of Michigan and Chicago, he became Olds Professor of 
Economics in Amherst College in 1915. He was formerly associate editor 
of the Journal of Political Economy, and is associate editor of the series, 
" Materials for the Study of Economics," published by the University of 
Chicago Press. During the War he was on the staff of the War Labour 
Policies Board. He is co-editor with J. M. Clark and H. G. Moulton of 
" Readings in the Economics of War," and the author of " Current Eco- 
nomic Problems" and of various articles in economic journals. 



WHO'S WHO OF CONTRIBUTORS 561 

Frederic C. Howe was born in Meadville, Pa., in 1867, and was edu- 
cated at Allegheny College and Johns Hopkins University, from the latter 
receiving the degree of Ph.D. in 1892. After studying in the University of 
Maryland Law School and the New York Law School, he was admitted to 
the bar in 1894, and practised in Cleveland until 1909. He was director of 
the People's Institute of New York from 191 1 to 1914, and Commissioner 
of Immigration in the Port of New York from 1914 to 1920. He has 
been a member of the Ohio State Senate, special U. S. commissioner to 
investigate municipal ownership in Great Britain, Professor of Law in 
the Cleveland College of Law, and lecturer on municipal administration 
and politics in the University of Wisconsin. Among his books are " The 
City, the Hope of Democracy," " The British City," " Privilege and 
Democracy in America," " Wisconsin : An Experiment in Democracy," 
"European Cities at Work," "Socialized Germany," "Why War?" "The 
High Cost of Living," and " The Land and the Soldier." 

Alfred Booth Kuttner was born in 1886, and was graduated from 
Harvard in 1908. He was for two years dramatic critic of the Interna- 
tional Magazine, and is a contributor to the New Republic, Seven Arts, 
Dial, etc. He has pursued special studies in psychology, and has trans- 
lated several of the books of Sigmund Freud. 

Ring W. Lardner was born in Niles, Michigan, in 1885, and was edu- 
cated in the Niles High School and the Armour Institute of Technology 
at Chicago. He has been sporting writer on the Boston American, Chicago 
American, Chicago Examiner, and the Chicago Tribune, and writer for 
the Bell Syndicate since 1919. Among his books are " You Know Me 
Al," " Symptoms of Thirty-five," " Treat 'Em Rough," and " The Big 
Town." 

Robert Morss Lovett was born in Boston in 1870, and was graduated 
from Harvard in 1892. He has been a teacher in the English Departments 
of Harvard and the University of Chicago, and dean of the Junior 
Colleges of the latter institution from 1907 to 1920. He was formerly 
editor of the Dial, and is at present on the staff of the New Republic. He 
is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and is the 
author of two novels, "Richard Gresham" and "A Winged Victory," of 
a play, " Cowards," and with William Vaughn Moody of " A History of 
English Literature." 

Robert H. Lowie was born in Vienna in 1883, and came to New York 
at the age of ten. He was educated at the College of the City of New 
York and Columbia University, from which he received the degree of 
Ph.D. in 1908. He has made many ethnological field trips, especially to 
the Crow and other Plains Indians. He was associate curator of An- 
thropology in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, 
■until 1921, and since then has become Associate Professor of Anthropology 
in the University of California. He is associate editor of the American 
Anthropologist, and was secretary of the American Ethnological Society 
from 1910 to 1919, and president, 1920-1921. He is the author of " Culture 
and" Ethnology " and " Primitive Society," as well as many technical 
monographs dealing mainly with the sociology and mythology of North 
American aborigines. 

John Macy was born in Detroit in 1877, and was educated at Harvard, 
from which he received the degree of A.B. in 1899, and A.M. in 1900. 
After a year as assistant in English at Harvard, he became associate editor 
of Youth's Companion, and later literary editor of the Boston Herald, 



S62 WHO'S WHO OF CONTRIBUTORS 

Among his books are "Life of Poe " (Beacon Biographies), "Guide to 
Reading," " The Spirit of American Literature," " Sociahsm in America," 
and " Walter James Dodd : a Biography." 

H. L. Mencken was born in Baltimore in 1880, and was educated in 
private schools and at the Baltimore Polytechnic. He was engaged in 
journalism until 1916, and is now editor and part owner with George 
Jean Nathan of the Smart Set Magazine, and a contributing editor of 
the Nation. His books include " The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche," 
" A Book of Burlesques," " A Book of Prefaces," " The American 
Language," and two volumes of "Prejudices." In collaboration with 
George Jean Nathan he has published " The American Credo," and 
" Heliogabalus," a play. 

Lewis Mumford was born in Flushing, Long Island, in 1895. He was 
associate editor of the Dial in 1919, acting editor of the Sociological 
Review (London), a lecturer at the Summer School of Civics, High 
Wycombe, England, and has contributed to the Scientific Monthly, the 
Athenaeum, the Nation, the Freeman, the Journal of the American Insti- 
tute of Architects, and other periodicals. He was a radio opera4;or in 
the United States Navy during the War. 

George Jean Nathan was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1882, and 
was graduated from Cornell University in 1904. He has been dramatic 
critic of various newspapers and periodicals, and is at present editor and 
part owner with H. L. Mencken of the Smart Set Magazine. Among his 
books are " The Popular Theatre," " Comedians All," " Another Book on 
the Theatre," " Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents," " The Theatre, the 
Drama, the Girls," and, with H. L. Mencken, of " The American Credo," 
and " Heliogabalus." 

Walter Pach was born in New York in 1883, and was graduated from 
the College of the City of New York in 1903. He studied art under 
Leigh Hunt, William M. Chase, and Robert Henri, and worked during 
most of the eleven years before the War in Paris and other European art- 
centres, exhibiting both here and abroad. He was associated with the 
work of the International Exhibition of 1913, as well as other exhibitions 
of the modern masters in America, and with the founding and carrying on 
of the Society of Independent Artists. He is represented by paintings 
and etchings in various public and private collections, has lectured at the 
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, University of California, 
Wellesley College, and other institutions, has contributed articles on art 
subjects to the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, L'Arts et les Artistes, Scribner's, 
the Century, the Freeman, etc., and is the translator of Elie Faure's 
" History of Art." 

Elsie Clews Parsons was graduated from Barnard College in 1896, 
and received the degree of Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1899. 
She has been Fellow and Lecturer in Sociology at Barnard College, Lec- 
turer in Anthropology in the New School of Social Research, assistant 
editor of the Journal of American Folk-Lore, treasurer of the American 
Ethnological Society, and president of the American Folk-Lore Society. 
She is married and the mother of three sons and one daughter. Among 
her books are " The Family," " The Old-Fashioned Woman," " Fear and 
Conventionality," " Social Freedom," and " Social Rule." 

Raffaello Piccoli, who has written the article on "American Civiliza- 
tion from an Italian, Point of View," was born in Naples in 1886, and was 



WHO'S WHO OF CONTRIBUTORS 563 

educated at the Universities of Padua, Florence, and Oxford. In 1913 
he was appointed Lecturer in Italian Literature in the University of Cam- 
bridge, and in 1916 was elected Foreign Correspondent of the Royal 
Society of Literature. During the War he was an officer in the First 
Regiment of Italian Grenadiers, was wounded and taken prisoner while 
defending a bridge-head on the Tagliamento, and spent a year of captivity 
in Hungary. After the Armistice he was appointed to the chair of English 
Literature in the University of Pisa. During the years 1919-21 he has 
acted as exchange professor at various American universities. He has 
published a number of books, including Italian translations of Oscar Wilde 
and of several Elizabethan dramatists. 

Louis Raymond Reid was born in Warsaw, N. Y., and was graduated 
from Rutgers College in 191 1. Since then he has been engaged in news- 
paper and magazine work in New York City. He was for three years 
the editor of the Dramatic Mirror. 

Ceroid Tanquary Robinson was born in Chase City, Virginia, in 1892, 
and studied at Stanford, the University of California, and Columbia. 
He was a member of the editorial board of the Dial at the time when it 
was appearing as a fortnightly, and is now a member of the editorial 
staff of the Freeman, and a lecturer in Modern European History at 
Columbia University. He served for sixteen months during the War as 
a First Lieutenant (Adjutant) in the American Air Service. Residence in 
Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Arizona, and California has given 
him the opportunity to observe at first hand some of the modes and 
manners of race-prejudice. 

J. Thorne Smith, Jr., was born in Annapolis, Md., in 1892, and was 
graduated from Dartmouth College in 1914. He was Chief Boatswain's 
Mate in the U. S. Naval Reserve during the War, and editor of the 
navy paper, The Broadside. He is the author of " Haunts and By-Paths 
and Other Poems," " Biltmore Oswald," and " Out-O'-Luck." 

George Soule was born in Stamford, Conn., in 1887, and was graduated 
from Yale in 1908. He was a member of the editorial staff of the New 
Republic from 1914 to 1918, and during 1919 editorial writer for the 
New York Evening Post. He drafted a report on the labour policy of the 
Industrial Service Sections, Ordnance Department and Air Service, for 
the War Department, and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the 
Coast Artillery Corps. He is a director of the Labour Bureau, Inc., which 
engages in economic research for labour organizations, and is co-author 
with J. M. Budish of " The New Unionism in the Clothing Industry." 

J. E. Spingarn was born in New York in 1875, was educated at 
Columbia and Harvard, and was Professor of Comparative Literature in 
Columbia University until 191 1. Among his other activities he has been a 
candidate for Congress, a delegate to state and national conventions, 
chairman of the board of directors of the National Association for the 
Advancement of Coloured People, vice-president of a publishing firm, and 
editor of the " European Library." During the War he was a Major of 
Infantry in the A. E. F. His first book, " Literary Criticism in the Renais- 
sance," was translated into Itahan in 1905, with an introduction by Bene- 
detto Croce; he has edited three volumes of "Critical Essays of the 17th 
Century " for the Clarendon Press of Oxford, and contributed a chapter 
to the " Cambridge History of English Literature ; " his selection of 
Goethe's " Literary Essays," with a foreword by Lord Haldane, has just 
appeared ; and his other books include " The New Hesperides and Other 
Poems " and " Creative Criticism." 



\/ 



564 WHO'S WHO OF CONTRIBUTORS 

Harold E. Stearns was born in Barre, Mass., in 1891, and was gradu- 
ated from Harvard in 1913. Since then he has been engaged in journalism 
in New York, and has been a contributor to the New Republic, the 
Freeman, the Bookman, and other magazines and newspapers. He was 
associate editor of the Dial during the last six months of its appearance 
as a fortnightly in Chicago. Among his books are " Liberalism in 
America " and " Collected Essays." 

Henry Longan Stuart is an English author and journalist who has 
spent a considerable part of his life since 1901 in the United States. He 
served through the War as a Captain in the Royal Field Artillery, was 
attached to the Italian Third Army after Caporetto, and was press censor 
in Paris after the Armistice and during the Peace Conference. He is 
the author of " Weeping Cross," a study of Puritan New England, 
" Fenella," and a quantity of fugitive poetry and essays. 

Deems Taylor was born in New York in 1885, and was graduated 
from New York University in 1906. He studied music with Oscar Coon 
from 1908 to 191 1. He has been connected with the editorial staff of the 
" Encyclopedia Britannica," and has been assistant Sunday editor of the 
New York Tribune and associate editor of Collier's Weekly, and at pres- 
ent is a critic of the Neiv York World. He has composed numerous 
musical works, including "The Siren Song" (symphonic poem, awarded 
the orchestral prize of the National Federation of Music Clubs in 1912), 
"The Chambered Nautilus" (cantata), "The Highwaymen" (cantata 
written for the MacDowell festival), and "Through the Looking Glass" 
(suite for symphonic orchestra). 

Hendrik Willem Van Loon was born in Holland in 1882, and received 
his education in Dutch schools, at Cornell and Harvard, and at the Uni- 
versity of Munich, from which he received his Ph.D., magna cum laude, 
in 191 1. He was a correspondent of the Associated Press in various 
European capitals, and for some time was a lecturer on modern European 
history in Cornell University. He is at present Professor of the Social 
Sciences in Antioch College, and is the author of " The Fall of the Dutch 
Republic," " A Short History of Discovery," " Ancient Man," " The Story 
cf Mankind for Boys and Girls," " The Rise of the Dutch Kingdom," etc. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Abbott, Lyman, 497 

Abolitionists, 58 

Absolute, 166 

Academic life, 95 

Accident lawyers, S9 

Acoustics, 159 

Adams, Henry, 11, T7, 191, 303, 547; 
quoted on a school of literature, 196 

Ade, George, 249 

Administrative officers, 32, 33 

Adolescence, 436 

Adulteration, 406 

Advertising, 381-395; appeal, 383; bibli- 
ography, 551; effects on the vi'riters, 
384; efficacy, 389; honest, 387; justifica- 
tion, 388; newspaper, 44; newspaper 
control, 46, 47; objectionable, 395; out- 
door, 305; overproduction and, 390; 
pro and con, 391; signs, 293, 39s; 
solicitor and writer, 387; value, 391, 
392; writers, 387 

Esthetic emotion, 204, 214, 480 

Esthetics, vii, 14, 100, 105, 108, 492, 497 

Africa, association of negroes to estab- 
lish empire, 369 

"Age of Innocence, The," 179 

Agnosticism, 171 

Agricultural implements, 402 

Aiken, Conrad, on poetry, 215-226 

Akins, -Zoe, 248, 253 

Alcohol, 451 

Alcoholics, children of, 452, 453 

Alien Land Laws, 364 

Aliens, 337-350; economics and, 339; 
legislative attitude to, 343; protection, 
349 

Alfien, Vittono, 104 

Alimony, 331 

Alleghany mountains, 4, 30, 399 

Allied troops, 469 

Alphabetical order, 469 

Amalgamated Clothing Workers, 346 

America, as economic support for Eu- 
rope, 475; feminization, 135, 143; 
germinal energy, 148, 150; original cul- 
ture, 512; provincialism, 286; "real 
America," 138 

" America First " Publicity Association, 
47 
American ideals," 104 

American infantry in Paris, 470 

American Legion, 88 

American literature. See Literature, 
American 

American Philosophical Association, 177 

American Revolution, 300, 399, 417, 515 

Americanism, 133, 519 

Americanization, 337, 344, 346, 347, 442, 
528; spirit, 88, 89 

Americans, uniformity, 36, 109 

Ames, Winthrop, 245 

Amusements, 8, 13, 440; music, 204, 205 

Anaemia, intellectual, 491, 492, 495, 501 

Ancestor worship, 506 

Anderson, Sherwood, 137 

Anglin, Margaret, 251 

Anglo-American relations, 471, 473, 474, 
476 



567 



Anglo-Saxonism, 320, 341, 442, 471, 504 
Anthony, Katharine, on the family, 319- 
. 336 

Anthropological groups, 353 
Anthropology, 154 
Anti-Saloon League, 29 
Anti-Semitism, 356, 364 
Appleseed, Johnny, 4 
Applied science, 146, 155-156 
Architecture, 238; city, debasement, 10; 

industrial city, 11 
Aridity of American life, 480 
Aristocracy, 193 
Aristocrats, 441, 442 
Armageddon, 440 
Armory Show, 239 
Art, 100, 204, 207, 227-241; bibliography, 

542; colonial, 230, 231; conditions and 

opportunities, 228; definition, 107; 

feminization, 229; morals and, loi; 

poetry, 225; tariff on works of art, 

230 
Art for art's sake, 102 
Artists, advertising as a benefit, 391; 

definition, 107; respect for, 208 
Asiatics. See Orientals 
Associated Press, 47 
Asylums, 334, 451 
Athletics, 526, 527; college, 117 
Atlantic City, 9 
Atlantic Monthly, 243 
Attorney-General, 66 
Austin, Mrs. Mary, 144 
Australia, farm policy, 347, 348 
Australian Courts of Conciliation, 73 
Authority, 160; educational, 85 
Automobile industry, 400 

Back to the land, 285 

Backgrounds, historical, 308; intellectual. 
146 

Bacteriologists, 454 

Baking industry, 400 

Ballot, 281 

Bar Associations, 65-66 

Bargaining, collective, 264; see also Con- 
tract 

Barnum, P. T., 292 

Barrie's " Peter Pan," 246 

Barrymore, John, 250 

Baseball, 458 

Baseball fans, 457 

Beard, C. A., 532, 547 

Beard, G. M., 430, 431, 432, 438 

Beautiful necessity, 165, 168 

Beauty, 14, 204, 238, 492, 535 

Beer-garden, 10 

Behaviour, 173; crowd, 312 

Behaviourism, 169 

Belief, 171 

Bell, Sanford, 436 

Bergson, Henri, 167, 172 

Bett, Miss Lulu, 320 

Beyer, O. S., Jr., on engineering, 417- 
425 

" Beyond the Horizon," 243, 244, 248 

Bibliographical notes, 531 

Big business, 406, 407, 409 



568 



INDEX 



Bigness, contrary effect on English and 

Americans, 477, 478 
Billboards, 293, 395 
Billiards, 460 
Billings, Frank, 449 
Biochemistry, 456 
Biographical notes on contributors to this 

volume, 559-564 
Biographies, 96; political, 532 
Biology, 456; experimental, 153 
Birth control, 320, 321, 322, 323; arti- 
ficial, 321 
Birth-rate, 321, 336 
Black Star Line, 369 
Blackburn, J. B., 231 
Blashfteld, E. H., 236 
Blind Tom, 207-208 
Board of Health, 304 
Boas, Franz, 154 

Bodenheim, Maxwell, 218, 221, 222, 223 
" Book of Daniel Drew, The," 72 
Boosters, 293 
Bosses, political, 24 

Boston, 4, 15; dramatic taste, 245; mar- 
riage age, 328; Public Library, 11, 235; 
Trinity Church, 11 
Boxing, 459 
Boyd, Ernest, on American civilization, 

489-507 
Brady, W. A., 244 

Brandeis, L. D., brief on Oregon law, tz 
Branford, V. V., 531 
" Brass Check, The," 41 
Breasted, J. H., 547 
Brewer, Justice P. J., 73-74 
Brill, A. A., 434 
British Institution of Civil Engineers, 

418, 419 
Britten, Clarence, on school and college 

life, 109-133 
Broadway, 8 
Brokers, 405 

Bronson-Howard, George, 249 
Brooke, Rupert, 503 
Brookline, Mass., 15 
Brooks, Van Wyck, iii; on the literary 

life, 179-197 
Brown, H. C., on philosophy, 163-177 
Brown University, 125 
Brunetiere, Ferdinand, 498, 503 
Bryan, W. J., 25, 425, 440, 451, 497 
Bryce, James, 196, 490, 532, 536 
Buddhism, 373 
Bundling, 315 
Bush Terminal Tower, 12 
Business, 397-415; American conception, 
482; bibliography, 551; blind sequence, 
414; government and, 48; honour, 405, 
409, 410, 430; individual and corporate, 
409, 410; revolution of methods, 405; 
State and, 264 
Business education, 80 
Business life, 186 
Business man's chivalry, 324 
Business world, 143 
Butler, Samuel, 188, 547 

California, early law, 54; gold discovery, 
403; Land Laws, 365; race-prejudice, 
^ 357, 364 
Calvinism, 164, 168 
Cambridge, Mass., 4, 6 
Canals, 403 
Canning industry, 401 
Capital, 404, 405 

Capital and labour, engineers and, 420 
Capitalism, 544; case for, 257, 261 
Captains of industry, 517 
Carnegie, Andrew, 18 



Carnegie Institution, 158 

Case-system, 68, 69 
Castberg, Johan, 332 

Caste system in college, 121 

Catechism. Negro, 370 
Catholic Church, 193 

Cattell, J. Nick, 538 

Cavalier and Puritan, 512, 513, 514 

Celibacy, 321, 328 

Cezanne, Paul, 239, 240 

Chafee, Zechariah, Jr., on the law, 53-75 

City, bibliography, 531 

Chain-store, 407 

Chambers, R. W., 192 

Character in business, 409 

Charm, personal, 112 

Chase, W. M., 234, 235 

Chastity, 454 

Chautauqua, 6, 83, 142 

Chekhov, A. P., 190 

Cliemistry of proteins, 456 

Chesterton, G. K., 477; on American 
genius, 183 

Chicago, 8, 10, 403; dramatic taste, 245 

Chickens, alcoholic, 452 

Chief Justice, 67 

Child labour, 275, 329 

Childhood, family influence, 335; short- 
ness, 185 

Children, fewer and better, 452; on farms, 
321; sexuality, 436; spoiling, 334 

Children's Bureau, 320 

Chinese, 373; Calif ornians and, 364; in 
America, 357 

Chiropractors, 444 

Chivalry of the business man, 324 

Christian Science, 438, 443 

Christianity, 166, 167 

Church, 35, Tj, 85, 146 

Church-college, 163, 168 

Cincinnati, 4, 8 

Circus parade, 292 

Cirrhosis of the liver, 452 

Cities, 3-20; architectural debasement, 10; 
civic equipment, 16; civic life, 16; 
country versus, 17; drama, outside New 
York, 245; future, 19; growth and im- 
provement, 15; improvements, 14; in- 
dustrial, 9, 10; provincial, 3; shifts of 
population and institutions, 7; spiritual 
failure, 9; State legislatures and, 24; 
three periods, 3 

Citizenship, good, 175 

City Beautiful movement, 14 

Civil engineers, 417 

Civil War, 139 

Civilization, human, 508; Roman, 509 

Civilization, American, as seen by an 
Englishman, 469-488; as seen by an 
Irishman, 489-507; as seen by an Ital- 
ian, 508-528 

Clark University, 434 

Classics, 79, 81, 94, 146 

Cleanliness, 392 

Clients and lawyers, 59 

Clouston, T. S., 452 

Clubs, college, 121, 128 

Coeducational forms, 129 

Cohan, G. M., 249, 457 

Cohen, M. R., 168 

Colby, F. M., on humour, 463-466 

Cole, R., 444 

Collective bargaining, 264 

College " Bible," 118 

College life, 109-133; athletics, 117; avo- 
cations, 128; bibliography, 536; caste 
system, 121; clubs, 121, 128; course 
system, 126; democracy, 118; exami- 
nation and passing, 126; extra-collegiate 



INDEX 



569 



social regimen, 129; fellowship, 123; 
moral crusades, 124-125; political man- 
agement of affairs, 124; recreation, 130; 
sex lines and forms, 129; social life, 
117-118; study, 125; traditions, 118 

College professors, 491; see also Pro- 
fessors 

College stories, 536 

Colleges, early church-college, 163, 168; 
see also Education 

Colonial culture, 138 

Colonial law, 54 

Colonialism, 97 

Colonies, 301, 493 

Colonists, 398 

Colour of God, 370 

Commercial city, 5 

Commercial God, 480, 481, 483 

Commercialism, 484 

Common Law, American conditions and, 
56; New England and, 54 ' 

Communist parties, 279, 280 

Community, New England, 5 

Compensation acts, 72 

Competition, 259, 260, 406, 482 

Composers, 199, 208, 210 

Compromise, 284 

Compulsions, 439, 440 

Concord, Mass., 4 

Coney Island, 13 

Conformity, 439, 520; college, 1 18 

Congress, 31 

Congressional Record, 27, 532, 544 

Congressmen, character, 22, 27, 33 

Conjugal fidelity, 309 

Connecticut, early land act, 55 

Conservatives, 273 

Constitution, U. S., 140, 506, S^S 

Contingent fee, 60 

Contract, 275; right of, 259, 262, 264 

Contract labour law, 343 

Contributors to this volume, brief biog- 
raphies, 559-564 

Control of industry, 257, 263, 419 

Conventions, 291; "iron hand of con- 
vention," 182 

Conventionalities, 252, 491; college, 129; 

Co-operative movement, 284 

Copley, J. S., 231, 232, 233, 237 

Cornell University, tradition, 120 

Corporation lawyers, 59 

Corporations, 406, 411, 412; State and, 
412 

Corrective Eating Society, 444 

Correspondence schools, 385 

Country, 287, 288; envy of the city, 17; 
social life, 294; see also Small town 

County fair, 295 

Crisis-emotion, 315 

Courage in journalism, 40 

Courts, diversity, 71 

Craftsmanship, 413 

Crane, Frank, 44 

Cranks, 147 

Craven, Frank, 248 

Credit, 405, 410, 413 

Credulity, 454; medical, 444 

Criminal law, 60, 70 

Criminals and lawyers, 60 

Criticism, 497, 503; American, 99; bibli- 
ography, 535; definition, 100, 108; dog- 
matic or intellectual, 100, 108; music, 
209; need, 105; scholarship and, 93-108; 
scholarship the basis, 99; schools of, 
100 

Cross of Gold, 440 

Crowd behaviour, 312 

Culture, 93, 106, 17s, 508; original Amer- 
ican, 512 



Curiosity, 130, 131, 175 

Daly, Arnold, 251 

Dancing, 526 

Dante, scholarship, 96 

Darwin, Charles, 163 

Days of grace, 64 

Declaration of Independence, 1^2, 133, 

140, 506 
Decorators, 2^6 
De Leon, Daniel, 545 
Demand and supply, 261 
Dementia prsecox, 434 
Democracy, college, 118 
Denmark, farmers, 347 
Department stores, 8; advertising in the 

newspapers, 389; newspapers and, 46; 

private tribunals, 70 
Dependence, habits of, 401 
Deportation, 342, 344, 348 
Devil, 439, 440 
Dewey, John, 168, 540; on education, 

17s; psychology, 173; weakness of his 

philosophy, 176 
Dickinson, Emily, 218 
Differentiations, regional, iii 
Diphtheria, 450 
Diplomacy, shirt-sleeve, 489 
Discipline, 471, 480, 482, 488 
Disease, 443, 445, 449, 455; prevention, 
T^449 
Dishonesty in business, 405, 409, 410, 

Divorce, attitude to, 309; 310; growing 

prevalence, 330 
Doctors, 443; see also Disease; Physicians 
Dogmatic criticism, 100, io8 
Domestic Relations Courts, 72, 331, 332 
Double personality, 433 
Dowden, Edward, 504 
Drachsler, Julius, 375, 376, 377 
Drama. S^e Theatre 
Drama League, 247 
Dreadnought Hams, 386 
Dreiser, Theodore, 181, 182, 180, 106. 

286 

East, the, 112 

Economic democracy, 339 

Economic liberty, 276 

Economic opinion, 255-270; basis and 
value, 270; opportunities, 346; bibliog- 
raphy, 543; radicalism, 276, 277, 278; 
volume, 269-270. 

Economics, classical, 259; facts and sta- 
tistics, 268; "fundamental," 273; im- 
migration and, 338; newer, 544; pro- 
test, 263; system, 517; waste, 284 

Eddy, Mrs. Mary Baker, 443, 498 

Edison, T. A., 436 

Editors, 36 

Education, 77-92, 524. 525; bibliography, 
534; corrupt practices, 90; Dewey's 
philosophy, 175; engineering, 423, 424; 
enthusiasm for, 109; feminization, 317; 
general and special, 81; medical, 455; 
State and, 89; superficial, 82; supersti- 
tious mood toward, 77, 78 

Edwards, Jonathan, 164, 165 

Efficiency, 471, 478, 481, 482, 484; social. 

Egoism, 197 

Eight-hour day, 275 

Elderton-Pearson report, 453 

Election machinery, 281 

Elections, 281 

Elective system in education, 79, 119 

Electric lighting, 14 

Electrical engineers, 417 



570 



INDEX 



Eliot, C. W., 79 

Eliot, T. S., 218, 221, 222, 223, 224 

Elizabethan literature, 220 

Ellis Island, 341 

Emerson, R. W"., 138, 164, 165, 1S4, 195, 

494 

Emotion, 203; 209; crisis, 315; lack, vii; 
mother-love, 437, 438; sex, 310, 317 

Emotionality, 176 

" Emperor Jones," 360 

Empiricism, 172 

Employer and employe, 483 

Employes' welfare, 484 

Employment, 482 

Engineering, 41 7-425 ;_ bibliography, 552; 
bulwark and inspiration, 424; new 
problems, 418 

Engineers, capital and labour, relation to, 
420; educational background, 423, 424; 
formulating a pelicy, 420; intellectual 
limitations, 423; intelligence, 455; 
larger function, 418; original function, 
418; position, 432; symbolic specula- 
tions, 423; typical, 417 

England, 512; bond with America, 473: 
competition with America, and courses 
open, 474; proletariat, 485, 487; war 
and post-war conditions, 487 

English language professors, 96 

Englishman's view of American civiliza- 
tion, 469-488 

Englishmen, as immigrants, 472; charac- 
ter, 476, 477, 478 

Erie Railroad, 72, 409 

Ethics, 174 

Ettinger, W. L., 87, 88 

Eucken, R. C, 167 

Europe, American attitude to, 486; at- 
traction, 238, 239; civilization and cul- 
ture, 5:1; history, 510; impoverish- 
ment, 473; problem, 511 

Evangelical literature, 496, 497 

Evening Sun, 250 

Exchange, 413 

Exercise, 458, 461 

Factory workers, 9 

Facts, 313 

Faith, 78; defending, 163; intellectual, 
51S 

Faithful servant, 320 

Family, 319-336; bibliography, 548; finan- 
cial arrangements, 324; income, and 
distribution, 323; influence on children 
335; nomadic habit, 333; public opinion, 
319; reduction in size, 320; reunions, 
294 

Farmer-Labour Party, 280 

Farming and alien immigrants, 346, 347 

Fear, 340, 341 

Federated Press, The, 50 

Feminization, 135, 143; education, 317; 
music, 205 

Ferguson, O. G., 359 

Fiction, American, 495; college, 536; 
sporting, 554 

Fish phosphates, 431 

Fiske, John, 185 

Five and ten cent store, 9 

Fletcher, J. G., 218, 220, 221, 222, 223, 
226 

Flexner, Simon, 154 

Focal infection, 448, 449 

Folin, Otto, 456 

Folksong, 211 

Food, children's, 334 

Food products, 401 

Football, 459 

Ford, Henry, 298, 299 



Foreign relations, 4B6 

Foreign trade, 414 

Foreign views of American civilization, 
bibliography, 555; Englishman's, 469- 
488; Irishman's, 489-507; Italian's, 508- 

foreigners, 275, 441; musical composers, 

199; see also Aliens; Immigration 
Fosdick, Raymond, 70 
Foster, W. Z., 282 
France, journalism, 39; medicine, 434 
France, Anatole, 142, 180, 494 
Francis Galton Laboratory, 453 
Fraternal orders, 6, 34, 290, 291 
Fraternities, 5, 6 
Freedom, 275, 489, 490, 491, 519; in 

love, 309; sexes in youth, 313, 315; 

speech, 74, 75; thought, 86, 87; see 

also Liberty 
Freeman, 51 
Fremont, J. C, 151 
French, D. C, 236 
Freshmen, iig, 120 
Freud, Sigmund, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437; 

books on, 435 
Friedenwald, Julius, 452 
Front parlour, 297 
Frontier, 301 
Frost, Robert, 184, 218, 221, 222, 226, 

503 
Froude, J. A., on Americans, 184 
Fugitive slave law, 58 
" Fundamental economics," 273 
" Fussing," 129 

Ga-Ga, 449 
Galileo, 152 

Galli-Curci, Amelita, 206 
Galsworthy, John, 243, 244, 250 
Galton (Francis) Laboratory, 453 
Garrett, Caret, on business, 397-415 
Gary, Ind., 12 
Gauguin, Paul, 189 
Geddes, Patrick, 531 
Generosity, 523 
Genius, 183, 188, 190, 194 
Genteel tradition, the, 147, 148, 163, 167 
' Gentleman and scholar," 94 
Georgia, legislature, 64 
German beer-garden, 10 
German idealism, 164 
German State, 302 
Ghost Dance, 372 
Gibbs, Willard, 152 
Gilbert, G. K., 153 
Gimbel Brothers, 46 
Glad hand, 5 

God, 166, 439; colour of, 370 
Gold in California, 403 
Golf, 459 
Gopher Prairie, 19 
Gorgas, W. C, 450 
Gorky, Maxim, i8o, 190, 192 
Gould, Jay, 410 
Gourmont, Remy de, 494 
Government, 275; business and, 48 
Grade schools, 84 
Graham, Stephen, 365 
Grandeur, 397 
Grape juice, 451 
" Great American novel," 93 
Greatness, 190, 191 
Greeley, Horace, Z7- 330 
Griffes, Charles, 212 
Group medicine, 446-447 
Group opinions, 161 
Grub Street, 189 
Guinea-pigs, 452 
Gullibility, 443, 449 



INDEX 



571 



Hamilton, W. H., on economic opinion, 

255-270^^ 
Hamsun, Knut, 180, 192 
Hancock, John, 399 
Hardy, Thomas, 180, 190 
Harris, William, Jr., 245 
Harvard College, 78, 79; democracy, 119 
Harvard Medical School, 443 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 185, 195 
" H. D.," 221, 223 
Health, exercise and, 458; politics and, 

451 
Health, Board of, 304 
Health crusade, 450 
Hearst newspapers, 43, 139, SOI 
Heathen, 450 

Helmholtz, H. L. F. von, 159, 160 
Herbert, Victor, 209 
Herd sense, 311 
Hero-worship, 461 
High schools, 83, 114, 525 
Highbrow, 131, 209 
Higher law, 58 
Hill, G. W., 153 
Historians, 95, 302, 306, 307; scientific, 

303. 304 
History, 95, 297-38, 509; American, 298, 

299; as an art, 303; bibliography, 547; 

early settlers, 300; popular estimate, 

298; 308 
Hoar, E. R., quoted on law and private 

judgment, 58 
Hocking, W. E., 167, 168, 172 
Holmes, Justice O. W., quoted on crim- 
inal law, 70; quoted on the law, 75 
Holt, E. B., 43S 
Home, 332 

Homer, Winslow, 233, 234, 236, 237 
Honesty in business, 405, 409, 410 
Honourables, 295 
Hopkins, Arthur, 245, 251, 253 
Hopkins, E. M., quoted on propaganda, 

86 
Hopwood, Avery, 249 
Horse racing, 459 
Hotels, 293 

Hours of work for women, 73 
Housewife, 325 

Howe, F. C, on the alien, 337-350 
Howells, W. D., 184, 191, 192, 194 
Hubbard, Elbert, 42 
Hughes, C. E., 50, 63 
Human civilization, 508 
Humanism, 509; Italy, 510 
Humboldt, Alexander von, 151 
Humour, viii, 463-466 
Husbands, 316; as providers, 324, 325 
Hypnotism, 433 
Hypocrisy, 252, 338 
Hysteria, 433, 438 

Ibsen, Henrik, 197, 503 

Idealism, advertising, 385, 394; American, 
164; German, 164; peculiar American, 
515; reaction to, 167 

Ideas, 501; political, 28; real test, 144 

Ignorance, 113 

Illusion, 295 

Imagination, 102, 103, 461 

Immigrants, 440; English, 472; law and, 
5J'; neurosis, 441; protection, 349; rapid 
rise and progress, 345; savings, 348 

Immigration, 301, 404; cause, 338; con- 
structive policy, 347; economic cause, 
338; hostility, 340; old and new, 338; 
percentage law, 344; problem, 337 

Immortality, 171, 436 

Impressionism, 105 

Impressionist criticism, 108 



Impressionists, 235 

Inalienable rights, 274 
ncest-complex, 438 

Independence Hall, 11 

Indian reservations, 363 

Indians, American, 351, 356; American- 
ization, 363; art influence, 227-228; 
bibliography, 550; culture and educa- 
tion, 371; marriage with whites, 376; 
religious movement, 372; treatment, 362 

Individual, 258 

Individualism, 287, 311, 439, 506 

Individuality, lack, 36 

Industrial accidents, 72, 73 

Industrial management, 419, 421 

Industrial revolution, 266, 516 

I. W. W., 276, 282 

Industrialism, birth, 9-10; city life, 9, 10, 
u; culture and, 12; disputes, 72; sys- 
tem, 260; see also Labour movement 

Industry, control, 257, 263, 419; secrets, 
421 

Inhibitions, 478 

Injustice, 341 

Inness, George, 233 

Insanity, 452 

Instrumentalism, 145, 168, 521 

Intellect, 521; distrust of, 519, 520; 
needs, 527 

Intellectual ansemia, 491, 492, 495, 501 

Intellectual faith, 515 

Intellectual life, 135-150, 523; back- 
grounds, 146; bibliography, 537; con- 
tempt for real values, 145; cranks and 
mountebanks, 147; pioneer point of 
view and, 136 

Intellectualist, 100 

Intellectualist criticism, 108 

Intelligence. 174 

International Exhibition of 19 13, 239 

Interstate Commerce Commission, 68 

Intolerance, 430 

Investigators, 156 

Ireland, 493 

Irish, 338 

Irishman's view of Am^'rican civiliza- 
tion, 489-507 

Irving, Washington, 186 

Isolation, 188, 287 

Italian's view of American civilization, 
508-528 

Italy, humanism, 510 

James, Henry, 183, 190, 503 

James, William, 82, 540; eminence, 152, 
154, 155; on genius, 194; pragmatism, 
171; psychology, 170 

Janet, Pierre, 433 

Japanese, 373; Californians and, 364; dis- 
like and fear of, 357 

Jefferson, Thomas, 274, 275, 276 

Jensen, J. V., 180 

Jews. 351; bibliography, 551; jealousy 
and_ fear of, 356; manifestations of 
prejudice against, 363; mixed mar- 
riages, 376; place, 372; religion, 373 

Jim Crow regulations. 358, 360 

Joan of Arc, canonization, 428 

Johnson, Lionel, 499 

Jokes, 463 

Journalism, 35-51, 180, 501; bibliography, 
533; England, 38; European continent, 
30; musical, 209 

Journalists, 36; courage and integrity, 40; 
" training and outlook," 41 

Judges. 65; selection and training, 66; 
unfair treatment, 67 

Judiciary, 66 
Jumel Mansion, 231 



572 



INDEX 



Jung, C. G., 436 
Justice, Minister of, 66 

Kallen, H. M., quoted on control of edu- 
cation, 91 
Kansas, 429; industrial court, 73 
Kempf, E. J., 435 
Kent, James, 56, 62 
Keynes, T. M., 506 
King, Willford, 324, 326 
Knowledge, 131 
Kodak, 18 

Korsakow's disease, 451 
Kraepelin, Emil, 433 
KrejTnborg, Alfred, 221, 223, 224 
Ku Klux Klan, 290, 359 
Kuttner, A.B., on nerves, 427-442 

Labour, American and English, 485, 486 
Labour movement, 193, 277, 278, 281 

282; engineers and, 420 
Labour organization, 72 
Labour-saving devices, 402 
La Forge, John, 235 
Laissez-faire economics, 256, 237, 543 
Land, colonies and settlement, 347, 348; 
free, 339, 343; immigration and, ^?q: 
speculation, 7, 8, 347 
Landscape painters, 232 
Langdell, C. C, 60 

Language of American leaders, 478. 470 
Lanier, Sidney, 187 

Lardner, R. W., on sport and play, akj. 
461 ^^' 

Law, 53-75; bibliography, 533; delays, ex- 
penses, etc., 71; disrespect for, 57 58- 
early hostility to English, 54, 56; flings 
at, S3; lack of progress, 63; newspaper 
discussion needed. 6z; obligation. 57, 
58; private judgment and, 58; real de- 
fect, 62 
Law schools, 68 
Lawyers, 53; changing function, 58-59; 

laymen and, 60, 61 
Laziness, 366 
Leadership, industrial, 425 
League of nations, 53 
Learning, 96, 108 
Legal aid societies, 72, 331 
Legal education, 68 
Legal systems, various, 65 
Legislation and lawyers, 60 
Legislatures and law reforms, 64 
Leisure, 139, 141 
Leisure class, 491, 505 
Lenin, Nicolai, lying about, 40 
Lewis, Sinclair, 192 
Liberals, 273 
Liberty, 485; economic, 276; see also 

rreedom 
Libido theory, 436 
Lick Observatory, 158 
Lindsay, Vachel, 218, 219, 220, 221, 22-' 
Lippmann, Walter, quoted on journalism 
_ .40, 43 

Literary test, 344 
Literary theory, 108 

Literature, morals and, loi; three con- 
ceptions, lOI 
Literature, American, 93, 492-493; ab- 
sence and reasons therefor, 504; bibli- 
ography, 540; colonial, 195; impotence 
of creative spirit, 179; lack of leader- 
ship, 189; namby-pamby books, 495- 
496; radical, 501, 502; school, 196; 
variety, 216 . y . 

Little red school-house, 302 
Lloyd George, David, 50 
Lodge, G. C, 183, 184 



Loeb, Jacques, 456 

London, Jack, 182, 183, 192 

London Labour Herald, 50 

London Times, 38, 63 

Long haul, 408 

Longevity, 328 

Louisiana, early law, 56 

Love, as an art, 318; freedom in, 309 

Lovett, R. M., on education as degrada- 
tion of energy, 77-93 

Low-browism, 526 

Lowell, Amy, 218, 220, 221, 222, -'21 
226; on our poetry, 215 ' 

Lowie, R. H on science— lack of fruitful 
background, 151-161 

Lusk Committee, 546 

Lusk law, 88, 90 

Lyceum, 6 

Lynching, 359, 360 

Mabie, H. W., 496 
]\JcCormick reaper, 402 
MacDowell, E. A., 210 
Mach, Ernst, 155, 156, 161, 530 
Machine politics, 24, 26 
Machinery, 402, 404 
McKim, C. F., II 
Macy, John, on journalism, 35-51 
Madison Square Garden, 11 
Magazines, 189; radical, 272, 273 
Maiden aunt, 320 

Main Street, 14, 204, 248, 287, 307 
Malnutrition, 334 "^ ' 

Manchester Guardian, 38 
Mandarins, 493, 494, 500 
Manet, Edouard, 240 
Mania a potu, 451 
Mann, Horace, 84 
Marden, O. S., 496, 497 
Marriage, 314, 315, 3,6; ages for, 327, 
320; Indians and whites, 376- mixed 
374, 375, 376; Negroes and whites,' 
374.. 375; protection, 310; war and, 331 
Married persons, 316 

Mars, visitor from, and his thoughts, 100 
Martians, no <= , ^ 

Martin, E. D., 312 
Martin, Homer, 233 
Masculine and feminine, 143 
Masefield, John, 503 
Mass fatalism, 196 
Mass production, 408 
Masters, E. L., 184, 218, 221, 222 
Masturbation, 311, 454 

&e'l^''F"•J.!^8i''*' '^'' '"'' ''^ 
Mating, 310 
Maury, M. F., 151 
May/lower, 350 
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 511 
Meat-packing, 401; idealism, 38s 
Mechanical engineers, 417 
Mechanics' Hall, 10 
Medical education, 455 
Medicine, 443-456; art of healing in 
America, 446; bibliography, 553; 
l;rench, 434; preventive, 449; preven- 
tive, contamination by religion, 454- 
preventive, retrogression, 450; science 
and, 444; specialization, and " grouD 
medicine," 446 
Melville, Herman, 188 
Men and women, dichotomy, 142 
Mencken, H. L., on aristocracy, 193; on 

iJolitics, 21-34 
Mental hygiene, 334 
Metaphysics, 176, 433 
Metropolitan Opera House, 199 
Metropolitanism, 16, 17, 19 



INDEX 



573 



Michelson, A. A., 152 

Microbes, 448 

Middle classes, 326 

Middle West, towns, s 

Migration, 301 

Miller, C. G., 46 

Milling industry, 401 

Milton, John, and Satan, 103 

Minister of Justice, 66 

Minorities, racial, 351-379 

Mitchell, S. Weir, 432 

Mob tyranny, 441 

Money, 112, 140; in college, 118 

Morality, vi, 526; alien population, 346; 
art and literature and, loi; business, 
405, 409, 410; realistic, 170 

More, P. E., 493, 498, 499, 500, 503, S44 

Morellet, Abbe, 103 

Morgan, L. H., 154 

Morgan, T. H., 154 

Mormon Church, 430 

Morrill Act, 417 

Morse telegraph code, 403 

Moses, M. J., 180 

Mosquitoes and yellow fever, 450 

Mother-love, 437, 438 

Motion pictures, 13; music accompani- 
ment, 212 

Motley, J. L., 195, 303 

Mulattoes, 374 

Mumford, Lewis, on the city, 3-20 

Municipal Art societies, 14 

Munsey's Magazine, 243 

Murry, J. M., on our poetry, 215 

Music, 199-214; American spirit, 214; 
bibliography, 541; classical and popu- 
lar, 209; composers, 210; criticism, 209; 
exotic, 211; feminization, 205; German, 
210; journalism, 209; motion pictures 
and,- 212; Negro, 211; technique, 159 

Musical comedy, 208 

Musical festivals, 207 

Musical Quarterly, 209 

Mysticism, 172, 519 

Mythology, 514, 515 

Napoleonic code, 56 
Nathan, G. J., on the theatre, 243-253 
National Education Association, 78, 88 
National Federation of Musical Clubs, 

205 

National Research Council, report on in- 
telligence, 454 

Nationality, 511 

Natural resources, 257, 260 

Natural science, 80 

Nature, 164, 168 

Necessity, 165, 168 

Negro Catechism, 370 

Negro Declaration of Independence, 370 

Negroes, 351; bibliography, 549; culture, 
371; decreasing proportion, 355; eco- 
nomic progress, 368; education, 361; 
exodus organization, 369; exodus to the 
North, 360; in literature, 360; interna- 
tional convention, 370; marriage with 
whites, 374, 375; music and religion, 
211, 368; new defiance of whites, 367; 
Northern prejudice against, 355, 359; 
repression in the South, 358; South- 
ern feeling about, 354; white friends, 
361 

Nerve tonics, 431 

Nerves, 335, 427-442; bibliography, 553 

Neurasthenia, 430, 432, 433 

Neuroses, 437 

Neurotics, 427 

New England, 179, 216, 301, 494, 502, 
514; common law, 54; culture, 138; 



early trade, 398; surplus women, 327; 
town, 3 

New Jersey, 400 

New Realism, 168 

New Realists, 168, 169 

New Republic, 51, 544; exposure of false 
nature of Russian news, 49 

New York (City), 16, 17; dominance, 18; 
plan, 7; School Board and trial of a 
teacher, 86; theatre, 243, 246 

New York (State), early law, 55 

New York Board of Health, 450 

New York Call, 44 

New York Code of Civil Procedure, 64 

New York Globe, 44 

New York World, 27 

New York Nation, 46, 51, 544; exposure 
of false nature of Russian news, 49 

New York Sun, 250 

New York Times, 27, 43, 46, 251; on 
parenthood, 321; Russian news, char- 
acter, 49 

New York Tribune, 36, 43 

New York World, 36 

New Yorkers, 285 

Newcomb, Simon, 153, 155, 552 

News, rough recipe, 38; sensational, 45; 
world, 48 

News services, 47 

Newspaper writers' organization, 41 

Newspapers, 483, 532; advertising and 
corruption, 389; advertisements, 44; ad- 
vertising, control by, 46, 47; attitude 
toward the theatre, 249; circulation, 35, 
43; Congressional reports, 27; corre- 
spondents, 37; counting-room control, 
45; influence, 35 ; legal questions, 63; 
readers imcritical, 43, 44; stories, 45; 
see also Journalism 

Nietzsche, F. W., 187, 190 

Nomadism, 333 

Non-conformism, reasoned, 160 

Non-conformists, 149 

Nonpartisan League, 281 

Novelists, 495, 496, 524 

Ochs, Adolph, 49 

Offences, minor legal, 70 

Office-holders, 24 

Oil industry, 400 

Old Guard, 252 

Omnistic philosophy, 433 

On the make, 430, 440 

One Big Union, 282 

O'Neill, Eugene, 243, 244, 245, 248, 251, 

360 
Open shop, 346 
Opera, 199 
Ophthalmoscope, 159 
Opinion, 148, 255; see also Economic 

opinion 
Opportunity, 522 
Optimism, 517, 518 
Orchestras, 199, 202 
Orchestration, 201 
Orders, fraternal, 6, 34, 290, 291 
Orientals, 351, 357, 450; bibliography, 

551; culture, 373; mixed marriages, 376 
" Origin of Species," 163 
Over-production, 413, 414; advertising 

and, 390 

Pach, Walter, on art, 227-241 
Panama Canal, 430 
Panics, 413 
Parades, 291, 292 
Paranoia, 434 
Parenthood, 310, 321 
Paresis, 453 



574 



INDEX 



Paris, entry of Allied troops on July 14. 
1919, 469 

Parsons, E. C, on sex, 309-318 

Party system, 30 

Parvenus, 106, 139 

Pasteur, Louis, 446, 449, 539 

Pattee, F. L., 498, Soo 

Patterson, J. M., 249 

Paul, the Apostle, 314 

Pavements, 14 

Payne, S. H., 533 

Pearl, Raymond, 452, 453 

Pearson, Karl, 453 

Pedants, 94, 97. 104, 108, 492 

Peirce, Charles, 173 

Pensions, widows', 329 

Perfectibility, 515 

Periodicals, 50, 51 

Perry, R. B., 170 

Personal charm, 112 

Personality, 106, 175; double, 433; home 
and, 335; lack, 97; university life and, 
95; women, 317, 318 

Petting, 315 

Phase rule, 152 

Philadelphia, dramatic taste, 246 

Philadelphia Press, 46 

Philosophers, American, 522 

Philosophy, 163-177, 517; American, 521; 
bibliography, 539 

Phosphates of fish, 431 

Physicians, importance, 443; intelligence, 
rank, 454; modern kind, 445-446; quasi- 
religious role, 445; testimony, 65 

Piccoli, Raffaello, on American civiliza- 
tion, 508-528 

Picnics, pioneer, 294 

Pictures, 204, 236, 237 

Pioneers, 97, 136, 137, 185, 193, 203, 294, 
429, 441, 515, 516; hostility to law, 57 

Pittsburgh, 4, 10; newspapers and the 
steel strike, 46 

Pittsburgh Survey of 1908, 14, S3i 

Platitude, 497 

Play, 457-461 „ , . 

Playwrights, 247, 248; foreign and 
American, 249 

Plough, 402 

Plumbing, 14 

Poe, E. A., 187, 194, 217 

Poetry, 102, 215-226, 524; bibliography, 
541; defi,nition, 107; modern vigorous- 
ness, 217; the "nonsense" of, 103, 
104; poetic consciousness, 224, 225 

Poetry: a Magazine of Verse, 217 

Poets, 100, 102, 208; definition, 108 

Police and law enforcement, 70 

Political biography, 532 

Political economy, bibliography, 552 

Political ideas, 28 

Political machinery, 281 

Politicians, 29; local, 22, 23 

Politics, 21-34; bibliography, 532; health 
movements and, 451 

Pool, 460 

Poor. See Poverty 

Poor whites, 355 

Population policies, 322 

Pound, Ezra, 217, 221, 223 

Poverty, 187, 188, 277, 346; college life, 
118; injustice, 71, 72; our forebears, 
337 

Power, 397 

Practical, the, 186 

Pragmatism, 145, 170, 171, 173, 192, 521 

Preaching and practice, vi 

Prendergast, M. B., 240 

Preparatory school, 116 

Presidency, 31 



Presidential campaigns, 25 
Press. See Journalism; newspapers 
Prevention of disease, 449; see also Dis- 
ease; Medicine 
Prices, open, 409 
Primitiveness, 479 
Primogeniture, 55 
Prince, Morton, 433 
Private property, 259, 262 
Production, engineers and, 421; mass, 

408 
Professionalism, 554 
Professors, 96, 97, 193, 491, 527 
Profit, private, 412, 413 
Profit-making, 265 
Progress, legal lack of, 63 
Prohibition, 24, 29, 440, 451, 495, 505; 

consequences, 71 ; origin of movement, 

287 
Promenade, 8 
Promiscuity, 438, 502 
Promised Land, 515 
Propaganda, 85, 86, 312, 440 
Property, governmental power over, 74; 

private, 259, 262; rights, 259, 262, 412 
Protection, beginnings, 399; see also 

Tariff 
Protest, economic, 263 
Provincial city, 3 
Provincialism, 286, 287, 366 
Prostitution, 316, 317 
Prussia, educational system, 84; family 

income, 323 
Psychoanalysis, 434, 435, 437 
Psychoanalysts, 435, 437 
Psychology, James', 170 
Psychotherapy, 433 
Public Health Service, 450 
Public opinion. See Economic opinion; 

Opinion 
Public service commissions, 72 
Publicists, writings, 496, 501 
Publicity pamphlets, 483 
Publishing, 112, 188; music, 210 
" Punch," American, 482 
Pure-food acts, 406 
Puritan and Cavalier, 512, 513, 514 
Puritanism, 54, 57, loi, 104, 130, 203, 

209, 212, 238, 252, 314, 439, 494, 504; 

culture, 513; morbidity, 502; original 

spirit, 519; remnants, 520 
Pushkin, A. S., 190 

Quackery, 431, 433, 443. 444 
Quality of commodities, 406 

Race-prejudice, 352, 353, 355, 377; mani- 
festations, 358; questions, 378-379 

Race suicide, 322 

Races, a quality or inequality, 352, 353 

Rachmaninoff, S. V., 206 

Racial minorities, 351-379; attitude _ in 
face of race-prejudice, 367; bibliog- 
raphy, 549; biological results, 374; four 
most important, 351; questions, 378- 
379 

Radicalism, 131, 174, 271-284, 505, 519; 
associations of the word, 271; bibliog- 
raphy, 545; definition, 274; economic, 
276, 277, 278; historic American, 274, 
275; reality and, 283; tendency, 283 

Radicals, 272 

Railroad stations, 293 

Railroads, 265, 401, 402, 403, 407, 411; 
rates and hauls, 407, 408; rebates, 408 

Rank, Otto, 437 

Rates, railroad, 407, 408 

Raw materials, 257 

Reactionaries, 273 



INDEX 



575 



Realism, 169, 204; new, 168; small town, 

286 
Realistic morality, 170 
Realists, 168, 169 
Reaper, 402 
Rebates, 408 
Reconstruction, 307 
Recreation, 457; college, 130 
Reform, 174 

Reformation, Protestant, 510 
Reformers, 439-440 
Regional differentiations, III 
Registration areas, 320 
Registration of deeds, 55 
Reid, L. R., on the small town, 285-296 
Relativity, 152 
Religion, v, 78, 167, 176, 427, 439, 508; 

founders, 428; Puritan, 513 
Religious movements, 518 
Renaissance, 94, 509; England, 512 
Representatives, 21 
Research, 156, 157 
Resources, natural, 257, 260 
Responsibility in business, 410 
Results, 174 
Revolution, 280; England, prospect, 474; 

Russian, 278 
Revolutionary War, 300, 399, 417, 515 
Rhode Island, Colonial legal training, 

.55 
Richardson, H. H., ir 
Riesenfeld, Hugo, 213 
Rights and duties, 72, 274 
Robinson, E. A., 184, 217, 221, 222, 226 
Robinson, G. T., on racial minorities, 

351-379 
Robinson, J. H., vi, 547 
Rockefeller Institute, 158 
Rome, civilization, 509 
Roosevelt, Theodore, 26, 440; on race 

suicide, 322 
Rosenau's " Preventive Medicine and 

Hygiene," 453 
Rothafel, S. L., 212 
Rowland, H. A., 153, 158 
Royce, Josiah, 165; ethics, 166; philoso- 
phy of religion, 167 
Russia, false news, 49 
Russian Revolution, 278 
Ryder, A. P., 187, 233, 234, 237, 542 
Rymer, Thomas, 103 

St. Louis, Mo., 8, 10 

Sainte-Beuve, C. A., 498 

Salesmanship, 405 

Sandburg, Carl, 103, 220, 221, 222 

Sanitariums, 431 

Sanitary engineers, 454 

Sankey, Justice, 68 

Santayana, George, 539, 540 

Sargent, J. S., 234, 235 

Satire, 247 

Saturday Evening Post, 248, 286, 507 

Savings of aliens, 348 

Scholarship, definition, 94, 105, 108 

Scholarship and criticism, 93-108; bibli- 
ography, 535 

School and college life, 109-133; bibli- 
ography, 536 

School of literature, 196 

Schoolmaster, 301 

Schools, function, 113; suppression of 
freedom of mind, 86, 87 

Science, 80, 436, 519, 522; American 
contributions, 151-152; applied, 146; ap- 
plied and pure, 155-156; bibliography, 
538; hothouse growth in America, 155; 
individual and organized, 156-157; lack 
of fruitful background, 151-161; medi- 



cine and, 444; results and self-doubt, 
169; theology versus, 163 
Scientific schools, first, 417 
Scientists, equipment, 158; spirit, 160 
Scope of the present volume, iv 
Scotch, 338 
Scott, C. P., 38 
Secondary schools, 83, 114, 115; private, 

115-116 
Secret societies, 290, 291 
Sects, 518, 519 
Sensational news, 45 
Sense and poetry, 104 
Sentimentality, 247, 252 
Servants, 320 
Service, 523 

Settlers, early, 300; immigrant, 343 
Sewers, 14 

Sex, 247, 309-318, 501; altitudes, 314; 
bibliography, 548; college relations, 129; 
concept of sexuality, 437; emotion, 310, 
317, 437; in children, 436; morality, 
322; problem, 436; relations, 316; rela- 
tions classified, 313, 314; sublimation, 
312; suppression of instinct, 311; youth 
and, 526 
Shakespeare, William, 220, 250 
Shaw, G. B., 179, 192, 243, 244; on 

America, 285 
" Shelburne Essays," 498, 500 
Sherman, Stuart, 493, 500, 503 
Shirt-sleeve diplomacy, 489 
Simplification of American life, 479, 480 
Sinclair, Upton, and " The Brass Check," 
^ 41 

Single Tax, 273 
Sissies, 142 
Slang, 112 
Slavery, 354, 365 
Slopping over, 471, 488 
Small Claims Courts, 71 
Small town, 285-296; bibliography, 546; 

character, 288; life, 289 
Smith, J. Thorne, on advertising, 381-395 
Smith, Reginald H., 71 
Smith, Theobald, 449 
Smoking, 440 
Smuggling, 399 
Soap, 392 

Social hygiene, 453 

Social life, 526, 527; freedom of youth, 
_ 313. 315 

Socialist Party, 278, 279 
Society, 516 
Society column, 333 
Solicitor, advertising, 388 
Soul and scholarship, 98 
Soule, George, on radicalism, 271-284 
Southern States, 139; Negro repression, 
358; society, 354, 365; white superior- 
ity, 366 
Specialists, 80 

Specialization, 79, 80, 158; surgical, 446 
Speculation in city land, 7, 8 
Spingarn, J. E., 535; on scholarship and 

criticism, 93-108 
Spirit, 518 

Spiritual activity, 93, 98 
Spiritual needs, 527 
Spiritual values, 520 
Spoiled child, 334 
" Spoon River Anthology," 221, 222, 226, 

Sport and play, 457-461; bibliography, 554 
Springfield Republican, 38 
Standard Oil Co., 409, 412 
Standardization, 149, 150, 335; American, 

hi; newspapers and readers, 36 
Standards, economic, 268 



576 



INDEX 



State, business and, 264; co-operations 
and, 412; diversity of legal systems, 
65; education and, 89; German, 302; 
legislatures, 24, 31 

Stearns, H. E., on the intellectual life, 

^ 135-150 

Sterility, 148 

Stevens, Wallace, 218, 221, 223, 224 

Stewart, A. T., 405 

Stock Exchange, 410 

Stockard, C. R., 452 

Stories, newspaper, 45 

Story, Joseph, 54, 56, 62 

Strikes and the newspapers, 46 

Stuart, H. L., on American civilization, 
469-488 

Student Councils, college, 124 

Sturgis, Russell, quoted on art, 237 

Style, 106 

Sublimation of sex, 312 

Suburbia, 15, 19 

Success, 517, 518 

Suffrage, 143 

Sumner, W. G., 543 

" Super-docs," 447 

Superstition, 78 

Supply and demand, 261 

Suppression of sex impulse, 311 

Surgeons, 446 

Swift, M. I., 172 

Sydenstricker, Edgar, 325 

Symbolists, 503 

Symons, Arthur, 499 

Sympathy, 175; professional physician, 
445 

Symphony orchestras, 199, 202 

Syphilis, 453 

Taboos, 315, 441, 494 

Talk, college, 130 

Tariff, 399, 414; works of art, 230 

Tarkington, Booth, 243, 248 

Taste, 106; definition, 100, 107-108; mu- 
sical, 200; theatrical, improvement, 243 

Taylor, Deems, on music, 199-214 

Teachers, control of teaching, 90; status, 
90; suppression of freedom of mind, 86, 
87; unions, 91 

Teasdale, Sara, 221, 222 

Teeth, infected, 448, 449 

Telegraph, Morse code, 403 

Ten Commandments, 307 

Tennis, 460 

Teutonic school, 303 

Texas fever, 449 

Textile industry, 402 

Theatre, 243-253; bibliography, 543; New 
York City, 243, 246; newspapers and, 
249 

Theology versus science, 163 

Things, 397 

Thomas, Augustus, 249 

Thomas, Theodore, 213 

Thoreau, H. D., 184, 194, 494 

Thorndike's tests, 154 

Thought, 105, 148, 479; uniformity, 439 

Threshing-machines, 402 

Thrift, family, 325 

Thucydides, 307 

Ticknor, George, 93, 96 

Tildsley, John, 87 

Tolstoy, Leo, 190, 499, 503 

Tom, Blind, 207-208 

Tonsils, 448, 449 

Towns, New England, 3; see also Small 
town 

Trade-mark, 409 

Trade secrets, 421 

Trade-union movement, 283 



Traditions, .■;28; college, 118; colleg^e and 

life at larg-e, 131-132 
Transportation, 401, 402, 408 
Trinity Church, Boston, 11 
Truth. 86, 92; love of, 144 
Tschaikovsky, P. I., 200, 213 
Tuberculosis, bovine and human, 449 
Turgeniev, I. S., 190 
Twachtman, J. H., 235 
Twain, Mark, 182, 187, 191, 194, 464 
Typhoid, 450 
Typography, 391 

Unconscious, the, 435, 436 

Undergraduate, 116 

Unemployment, 414 

Uniform Negotiable Instruments Law, 64 

Uniformity, colleges and life, 131-132 

Unions, 283 

U. S. Geological Survey, 158 

Universal Negro Improvement Assn., 369 

Universities, 524, 526; materialism, 97; 
mediocity of life and scholarship, 95, 
96, 97; professors, 96, 97, 193, 4^1, 
527; see also College life; Colleges 

Untermeyer, Louis, on our poetry, 215 

Uplifters, 450, 497 

Vaccination for typhoid, 450 

Valparaiso LTniversity, 119, 124 

Van Dyke, Henry, 496 

Van Loon, H. W., on history, 297-'«o8 

Van Slyke, D. D., 456 

Vanderlyn, John, 232 

Vaughan, V. C, 444 

Veblen, T. B., 544, 545 

Venereal peril, 453 

Venereal prophylaxis, 454 

Verihood, 86 

Versailles, 305 

Victrolas, 212 

Villagers, 285 

Villages, atmosphere, 290 

Virginia schools, white and Negro, 359 

Vision, 177, 480, 481 

Vital statistics, 319, 320 

Volstead Act, debate on, 28 

Volunteer firemen's organizations, 292 

Wanamaker, John, 46 

War. See World War 

Washington, D. C, dramatic taste, 246 

Washington Square Players, 252 

Waste, business, 413; economic, 284; in- 
dustrial, 419 

Water, danger of excessive use, 451 

Wealth, 413 

Weir, J. A., 23s 

Welfare of employes, 483 

Wellman, Rita, 248 

Wells, H. G., 457 

Weltanschauung, loi, 102 

Wendell, Barrett, quoted on education, 77 

Werner, Judge, W. E., 73 

West, the, 112 

Wharton, ]\Irs. Edith, 179 

Whistler, J. A. M., 234, 237 

White, Stanford, 11 

White City, 13 

White Ways, 13 

Whitman, Walt, 149, 185, i86, 187, 188, 
190, 194, 215, 217, 504, 523 

Who's who in this volume, 559-564 

Widowhood, prevention, 329 

VVidows, 328, 329 

Wigmore, J. H., 69, 75 

Wild oats, 316 

Wilson, Woodrow, 25, 450 

" Winesburg, Ohio," 137 



INDEX 



577 



Winsett, Ned, 179 

Wisscnschaftllchkcit, 303, 304 

Witchcraft, 429 

Wives, thrifty, 324, 325 

Women, beaiity, ^31, 438; dominance in 
art, 229; dominance in intellectual life, 
135; dominance in music, 205; hours 
of work, 73; in industry, 326; interests, 
142; longevity, 328; maintenance at 
leisure, 139, 141; men and, dichotomy, 
142; men's circumspection as to, 316; 
nervous, 432; personality, 317, 318; 
psychology, 317; surplus, 326, 337 

Women's clubs, 142 

Woodberry, G. E., loi 

Woods, A. H., 24s, 251 



Work for work's sake, 491 

Workmen's compensation, 72 

Workmen's families, 325, 326 

World news, 48 

World War, business and, 413; historians 

and, 304 
World's Fair, Chicago, 13 
Wyant, A. H., 233 

Yeast, 444 

Yeats, W. B., 499 

Yellow fever, 450 

Y.M.C.A., 144; instruction, 83 

Youth, sex life, 526 

Zenger, Peter, 55 













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